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  1. Gender and Gender Terms.Elizabeth Barnes - 2019 - Noûs 54 (3):704-730.
    Philosophical theories of gender are typically understood as theories of what it is to be a woman, a man, a nonbinary person, and so on. In this paper, I argue that this is a mistake. There’s good reason to suppose that our best philosophical theory of gender might not directly match up to or give the extensions of ordinary gender categories like ‘woman’.
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  • Are women adult human females?Alex Byrne - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (12):3783-3803.
    Are women (simply) adult human females? Dictionaries suggest that they are. However, philosophers who have explicitly considered the question invariably answer no. This paper argues that they are wrong. The orthodox view is that the category *woman* is a social category, like the categories *widow* and *police officer*, although exactly what this social category consists in is a matter of considerable disagreement. In any event, orthodoxy has it that *woman* is definitely not a biological category, like the categories *amphibian* or (...)
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  • The metaphysics of intersectionality.Sara Bernstein - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (2):321-335.
    This paper develops and articulates a metaphysics of intersectionality, the idea that multiple axes of social oppression cross-cut each other. Though intersectionality is often described through metaphor, theories of intersectionality can be formulated using the tools of contemporary analytic metaphysics. A central tenet of intersectionality theory, that intersectional identities are inseparable, can be framed in terms of explanatory unity. Further, intersectionality is best understood as metaphysical and explanatory priority of the intersectional category over its constituents, akin to metaphysical priority of (...)
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  • Chains of Being: Infinite Regress, Circularity, and Metaphysical Explanation.Ross P. Cameron - 2022 - Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    'Chains of Being' argues that there can be infinite chains of dependence or grounding. Cameron also defends the view that there can be circular relations of ontological dependence or grounding, and uses these claims to explore issues in logic and ontology.
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  • Ontic Injustice.Katharine Jenkins - 2020 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 6 (2):188-205.
    In this article, I identify a distinctive form of injustice—ontic injustice—in which an individual is wronged by the very fact of being socially constructed as a member of a certain social kind. To be a member of a certain social kind is, at least in part, to be subject to certain social constraints and enablements, and these constraints and enablements can be wrongful to the individual who is subjected to them, in the sense that they inflict a moral injury. The (...)
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  • Categories We Live By: Reply to Alcoff, Butler, and Roth. Ásta - 2021 - European Journal of Philosophy 31 (1):310-318.
    The author of Categories We Live By replies to critics Linda Martín Alcoff, Judith Butler, and Abraham Sesshu Roth.
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  • The Normativity of Gender.Rach Cosker-Rowland - 2024 - Noûs 58 (1):244-270.
    There are important similarities between moral thought and talk and thought and talk about gender: disagreements about gender, like disagreements about morality, seem to be intractable and to outstrip descriptive agreement; and it seems coherent to reject any definition of what it is to be a woman in terms of particular social, biological, or other descriptive features, just as it seems coherent to reject any definition of what it is to be good or right in terms of any set of (...)
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  • Social Ontology.Brian Epstein - 2018 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Social ontology is the study of the nature and properties of the social world. It is concerned with analyzing the various entities in the world that arise from social interaction. -/- A prominent topic in social ontology is the analysis of social groups. Do social groups exist at all? If so, what sorts of entities are they, and how are they created? Is a social group distinct from the collection of people who are its members, and if so, how is (...)
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  • Metaphysics.Peter Van Inwagen, Meghan Sullivan & Sara Bernstein - 2023 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • Resisting Social Categories.Sara Bernstein - 2024 - Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility 8:81-102.
    The social categories to which we belong—Latino, disabled, American, woman— causally influence our lives in deep and unavoidable ways. One might be pulled over by police because one is Latino, or one might receive a COVID vaccine sooner because one is American. Membership in these social categories most often falls outside of our control. This paper argues that membership in social categories constitutes a restriction on human agency, creating a situation of non-ideal agency for many human individuals. -/- However, there (...)
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  • Sex and Gender.Esther Rosario - 2024 - In Kathrin Koslicki & Michael J. Raven (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Essence in Philosophy. New York, NY: Routledge.
    This chapter surveys essentialist and anti-essentialist theories of sex and gender. It does so by engaging three approaches to sex and gender: externalism, internalism, and contextualism. The chapter also draws attention to two key debates about sex and gender in the feminist literature: the debate about the sex/gender distinction (the distinction debate) and the debate about whether sex and gender have essences (the essentialism/anti-essentialism debate). In addition, it describes three problems that theories of sex and gender tend to face: the (...)
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  • Social kind realism as relative frame manipulability.Yorgos Karagiannopoulos & Alexios Stamatiadis-Bréhier - 2024 - Philosophical Studies 181 (6):1655–1679.
    In this paper we introduce the view that realism about a social kind K entails that the grounding conditions of K are difficult (or impossible) to manipulate. In other words, we define social kind realism in terms of relative frame manipulability (RFM). In articulating our view, we utilize theoretical resources from Epstein’s (Epstein, The ant trap: Rebuilding the foundations of the Social Sciences. Oxford University Press, 2015) grounding/anchoring model and causal interventionism. After comparing our view with causal and principle-based (Tahko, (...)
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  • Failures of Methodological Individualism: The Materiality of Social Systems.Sally Haslanger - 2020 - Journal of Social Philosophy 53 (4):512-534.
    Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.
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  • Treating people as individuals and as members of groups.Lauritz Aastrup Munch & Nicolai Knudsen - 2024 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 110 (1):253-272.
    Many believe that we ought to treat people as individuals and that this form of treatment is in some sense incompatible with treating people as members of groups. Yet, the relation between these two kinds of treatments is elusive. In this paper, we develop a novel account of the normative requirement to treat people as individuals. According to this account, treating people as individuals requires treating people as agents in the appropriate capacity. We call this the Agency Attunement Account. This (...)
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  • The Sexual Orientation/Identity Distinction.Matthew Andler - 2021 - Hypatia 36 (2):259-275.
    The sex/gender distinction is a staple of feminist philosophy. In slogan form: sex is “natural,” while gender is the “social meaning” of sex. Considering the importance of the sex/gender distinction—which, here, I neither endorse nor reject—it’s interesting to ask if philosophers working on the metaphysics of sexuality might make use of an analogous distinction. In this paper, I argue that we ought to endorse the sexual orientation/identity distinction. In particular, I argue that the orientation/identity distinction is indispensable to normative explanations (...)
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  • What is social hierarchy?Han van Wietmarschen - 2021 - Noûs 56 (4):920-939.
    Under which conditions are social relationships hierarchical, and under which conditions are they not? This article has three main aims. First, I will explain what this question amounts to by providing a more detailed description of the general phenomenon of social hierarchy. Second, I will provide an account of what social hierarchy is. Third, I will provide some considerations in favour of this account by discussing how it improves upon three alternative ways of thinking about social hierarchy that are sometimes (...)
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  • Finean Feminist Metaphysics.Asya Passinsky - 2021 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 64 (9):937-954.
    Feminist metaphysicians have recently argued that many of the most influential contemporary meta-metaphysical frameworks are at odds with feminist metaphysics. In this paper I argue that the Finean framework of grounding, essence, and reality evades the main challenges that have been raised for alternative frameworks. The upshot of my discussion is that the Finean framework is an apt one for feminist metaphysics.
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  • Stigma: The Shaming Model.Euan Allison - 2024 - European Journal of Philosophy 32 (3):860-875.
    According to a dominant view of stigma, a person is stigmatized within a community if sufficiently many people within that community hold a bad view of her. I call this the 'Bad View Model'. In this paper, I argue against the Bad View Model on the grounds that such beliefs are neither necessary nor sufficient for stigma, and that the account cannot explain the distinctive phenomenology of stigma, including certain vulnerabilities to shame. I then develop an alternative that explains these (...)
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  • Feminism Without Metaphysics or a Deflationary Account of Gender.Louise Antony - 2020 - Erkenntnis 85 (3):529-549.
    I argue for a deflationary answer to the question, “What is it to be a woman?” Prior attempts by feminist theorists to provide a metaphysical account of what all and only women have in common have all failed for the same reason: there is nothing women have in common beyond being women. Although the social kinds man and woman are primitive, their existence can be explained. I say that human sex difference is the material ground of systems of gender; gender (...)
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  • Critique of telic power.Sandro Guli' & Luca Moretti - manuscript
    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 suggests that these forms of power share the same (...)
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  • Social kinds are essentially mind-dependent.Rebecca Mason - 2021 - Philosophical Studies 178 (12):3975-3994.
    I defend a novel view of how social kinds (e.g., money, women, permanent residents) depend on our mental states. In particular, I argue that social kinds depend on our mental states in the following sense: it is essential to them that they exist (partially) because certain mental states exist. This analysis is meant to capture the very general way in which all social kinds depend on our mental states. However, my view is that particular social kinds also depend on our (...)
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  • Stereotyping as Discrimination: Why Thoughts Can Be Discriminatory.Erin Beeghly - 2021 - Social Epistemology 35 (6):547-563.
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  • The Metaphysics of gender is (Relatively) substantial.Kevin Richardson - 2022 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 107 (1):192-207.
    According to Sider, a question is metaphysically substantive just in case it has a single most natural answer. Recently, Barnes and Mikkola have argued that, given this notion of substantivity, many of the central questions in the metaphysics of gender are nonsubstantive. Specifically, it is plausible that gender pluralism—the view that there are multiple, equally natural gender kinds—is true, but this view seems incompatible with the substantivity of gender. The goal of this paper is to argue that the notion of (...)
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  • Sorting and the ecology of freedom of association.Valerie Soon - 2023 - Journal of Political Philosophy 31 (4):411-432.
    Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.
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  • Hidden figures: epistemic costs and benefits of detecting (invisible) diversity in science.Uwe Peters - 2021 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 11 (1):1-21.
    Demographic diversity might often be present in a group without group members noticing it. What are the epistemic effects if they do? Several philosophers and social scientists have recently argued that when individuals detect demographic diversity in their group, this can result in epistemic benefits even if that diversity doesn’t involve cognitive differences. Here I critically discuss research advocating this proposal, introduce a distinction between two types of detection of demographic diversity, and apply this distinction to the theorizing on diversity (...)
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  • Feminist metaphysics.Sally Haslanger & Ásta Kristjana Sveinsdóttir - 2008;2011 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • What's at Stake in the Race Debate?Ron Mallon - 2022 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 60 (S1):54-72.
    How can there be so much apparent disagreement about what race is, when there is so much agreement on the facts surrounding race? In this paper, I develop this puzzle and consider several interpretations of work in the philosophy of race to try to answer it, several ways of understanding what the metaphysics of race is doing. I consider and reject the possibility that apparent disagreement is metaphysically substantive, and I also consider and reject the view that apparent disagreement primarily (...)
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  • Trans Women, Cis Women, Alien Women, and Robot Women Are Women: They Are All (Simply) Adults Gendered Female.Marcus Arvan - 2023 - Hypatia 38 (2):373-389.
    Alex Byrne contends that women are (simply) adult human females, claiming that this thesis has considerably greater initial appeal than the justified true belief (JTB) theory of knowledge. This paper refutes Byrne’s thesis in the same way the JTB theory of knowledge is widely thought to have been refuted: through simple counterexamples. Lessons are drawn. One lesson is that women need not be human. A second lesson is that biology and physical phenotypes are both irrelevant to whether someone is a (...)
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  • Sex and gender in sport categorization: aiming for terminological clarity.Irena Martínková, Taryn Knox, Lynley Anderson & Jim Parry - 2022 - Journal of the Philosophy of Sport 49 (1):134-150.
    It is difficult to develop good arguments when the central terms of the discussion are unclear – as with the current confused state of sex and gender terminology. Sports organisations and sports re...
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  • Is conferralism descriptively adequate?Linda Martín Alcoff - 2022 - European Journal of Philosophy 31 (1):289-296.
    This paper will develop a set of concerns about a central feature of Ásta's account of social categories that she calls “conferralism.” I argue that generalist approaches to social categories such as Ásta provides are inadequate as a way of understanding the diverse formations of diverse categories, and that conferralism overemphasizes the power of top-down forces (what she calls “persons with standing”) to confer social identities. This approach then underplays the horizontal and bottom-up influences on category formation as well as (...)
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  • A Plea for Descriptive Social Ontology.Kathrin Koslicki & Olivier Massin - 2023 - Synthese 202 (Special Issue: The Metametaphysi):1-35.
    Social phenomena—quite like mental states in the philosophy of mind—are often regarded as potential troublemakers from the start, particularly if they are approached with certain explanatory commitments, such as naturalism or social individualism, already in place. In this paper, we argue that such explanatory constraints should be at least initially bracketed if we are to arrive at an adequate non-biased description of social phenomena. Legitimate explanatory projects, or so we maintain, such as those of making the social world fit within (...)
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  • Realizing race.Aaron M. Griffith - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (7):1919-1934.
    A prominent way of explaining how race is socially constructed appeals to social positions and social structures. On this view, the construction of a person’s race is understood in terms of the person occupying a certain social position in a social structure. The aim of this paper is to give a metaphysically perspicuous account of this form of race construction. Analogous to functionalism about mental states, I develop an account of a ‘race structure’ in which various races (Black, White, Asian, (...)
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  • How to Project a Socially Constructed Sexual Orientation.Peter Finocchiaro - 2021 - Journal of Social Ontology 7 (2):173-203.
    Was bisexuality a widespread feature of ancient Greek society? This question is an instance of cross-cultural projection -- of taking the means through which people are categorized in one culture and applying it to members of another. It’s widely held by those who think that sexual orientation is socially constructed that its projection poses a problem. In this paper, I offer a more careful analysis of this alleged problem. To analyze projection, I adapt Iris Einheuser’s substratum-carving model of conventionalism to (...)
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  • Categorical Injustice. Ásta - 2019 - Journal of Social Philosophy 50 (4):392-406.
    Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.
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  • ‘I Am a Man’: Countering Oppression through Appeal to Kind Membership.Suzy Killmister - 2023 - Journal of Applied Philosophy 40 (5):919-935.
    All too often, social kinds function as sites of oppression. To be a woman, to be Black, to be trans – each, in its own way, situates someone at the lower end of a social hierarchy. Membership in such groups thus constitutes a liability: notwithstanding the goods people draw from sharing in these identities, they also stand at perpetual risk of those same identities exposing them to significant harm. What, if anything, can members of oppressed groups do to counter that (...)
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  • How to Solve the Gender Inclusion Problem.Cameron Domenico Kirk-Giannini - forthcoming - Hypatia.
    The inclusion problem for theories of gender arises when those theories inappropriately fail to include certain individuals in the gender categories to which they ought to belong. The inclusion problem affects both of the most influential traditions in feminist theorizing about gender: social-position accounts and identity accounts. I argue that the inclusion problem can be solved by adopting a structured theory of gender, which incorporates aspects of both social-position accounts and identity accounts. According to the theory I favor, an individual’s (...)
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  • Naturalistic approaches to social construction.Ron Mallon - 2009 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Social “construction,” “constructionism” and “constructivism” are terms in wide use in the humanities and social sciences, and are applied to a diverse range of objects including the emotions, gender, race, sex, homo- and hetero-sexuality, mental illness, technology, quarks, facts, reality, and truth. This sort of terminology plays a number of different roles in different discourses, only some of which are philosophically interesting, and fewer of which admit of a “naturalistic” approach—an approach that treats science as a central and successful (if (...)
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  • So What's My Part? Collective Duties, Individual Contributions, and Distributive Justice.Moritz A. Schulz - 2023 - Historical Social Research 48 (3: Collective Agency):320-349.
    Problems in normative ethics paradigmatically concern what it is obligatory or permissible for an individual to do. Yet sometimes, each of us ought to do something individually in virtue of what we ought to do together. Unfortunately, traversing these two different levels at which a moral obligation can arise – individual and collective – is fraught with difficulties that easily lure us into conclusions muddying our understanding of collective obligations. This paper seeks to clearly lay out a systematic problem central (...)
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  • Max Weber and Social Ontology.Joshua Rust - 2021 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 51 (3):312-342.
    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 (...)
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  • The stability of social categories.Abraham Sesshu Roth - 2021 - European Journal of Philosophy 31 (1):297-309.
    One important thesis Ásta defends in Categories We Live By is that social properties and categories are somehow dependent on our thoughts, attitudes, or practices—that they are inventions of the mind, projected onto the world. Another important aspect of her view is that the social properties are related to certain base properties; an individual is placed in a category when the relevant base properties are thought to hold of them. I see the relationship between the social and the base as (...)
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  • Conferralism and Intersectionality: A Response to Ásta’s Categories We Live By.Katharine Jenkins - 2019 - Journal of Social Ontology 5 (2):261-272.
    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.
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  • Evaluative Injustice.Thomas Carnes - forthcoming - Journal of Value Inquiry.
    This paper proposes the notion of evaluative injustice as a distinct kind of injustice. Evaluative injustice occurs when someone is evaluated with regard to whether one satisfies the ideal associated with a social role one occupies, and the evaluation is characterized by an unjust failure of appraisal respect. This kind of injustice is importantly distinct from other kinds of injustice recently theorized, in particular epistemic injustice (Fricker 2007) and ontological injustice (Jenkins 2023). It is distinct insofar as it is how (...)
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  • Has social constructionism about race outlived its usefulness? Perspectives from a race skeptic.Adam Hochman - 2022 - Biology and Philosophy 37 (6):1-20.
    The phrase ‘social constructionism about race’ is so ambiguous that it is unable to convey anything very meaningful. I argue that the various versions of social constructionism about race are either false, overly broad, or better described as anti-realism about biological race. One of the central rhetorical purposes of social constructionism about race has been to serve as an alternative to biological racial realism. However, most versions of social constructionism about race are compatible with biological racial realism, and there are (...)
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  • Public Health, Political Solidarity, and the Ethics of Orientation Ascriptions.Matthew Andler - 2022 - Ergo 8 (27).
    How ought we socially to categorize individuals with respect to sexual orientation? In this paper, I engage with philosophical work on the foundations of political solidarity as well as public health research on the treatment and prevention of HIV/AIDS in order to develop a categorization scheme conducive to the normatively important aims of LGBTQIA+ social movements.
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  • What Social Construction Isn’t.Emilie Pagano - 2021 - Philosophia 49 (4):1651-1670.
    Just as contemporary metaphysics, in general, is marked by an interest in ground, contemporary social metaphysics, in particular, is marked by an interest in social construction. It’s no surprise, then, that some contemporary metaphysicians have come to understand social construction in terms of ground. In this paper, I argue that this is a mistake. In particular, I argue that any otherwise plausible account of construction as ground is objectionably revisionary. First, I discuss an argument for the view that construction is (...)
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  • A Dilemma for Conferralism.Elizabeth VanKammen & Michael Rea - forthcoming - Analysis.
    Conferralism is the view that social properties are neither intrinsic to the things that have them nor possessed simply by virtue of their causal or spatiotemporal relations to other things, but are somehow bestowed (intentionally or not, explicitly or not) upon them by persons who have both the capacity and the standing to bestow them. We argue that conferralism faces a dilemma: either it is viciously circular, or it is limited in scope in a way that undercuts its motivation.
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  • Solving the inclusion problem: Gender without representationalism.E. Willems - 2024 - Synthese 204 (174):1-27.
    Recent work in the metaphysics of gender mostly focuses on trying to solve the exclusion problem - roughly, the problem of giving a metaphysical account of gender that doesn’t exclude anyone from their appropriate gender category. It is acknowledged that no completely satisfactory answer to the exclusion problem has yet been given in the literature; typically such theories fail to account for the diverse experiences and characteristics of trans people. One response is to adopt an anti-realism about gender properties, such (...)
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  • Social ontology in metaethics.Gloria Mähringer - 2024 - Philosophy and Social Criticism 50 (9):1394-1413.
    This article enriches discussions about the metaphysics of normative facts with conceptual resources from social ontology that metaethics has neglected so far: the resources of Haslanger’s critical realism as social constructionism. By pointing out the viability of understanding reasons as socially constructed facts, the article shows how normative facts can be understood as features of mind-independent reality that are, however, not features of the universe independently of social practices. The move into social ontology allows us to understand normative facts as (...)
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  • Patriarchy as Institutional.Johan Brännmark - 2021 - Journal of Social Ontology 7 (2):233-254.
    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 (...)
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  • Individualistic and Structural Explanations in Ásta’s Categories We Live By.Aaron M. Griffith - 2019 - Journal of Social Ontology 5 (2):251-260.
    Ásta’s Categories We Live By is a superb addition to the literature on social metaphysics. In it she offers a powerful framework for understanding the creation and maintenance of social categories. In this commentary piece, I want to draw attention to Ásta’s reliance on explanatory individualism – the view that the social world is best explained by the actions and attitudes of individuals. I argue that this reliance makes it difficult for Ásta to explain how many social categories are maintained (...)
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