Social Ontology

Constitutive Rules and Institutions

by Mario Ricciardi

Seminar paper for a jont meeting of the "Irish Philosophical Club" and the "Royal Institute of Philosophy", Ballymanscanlon february 1997

Tsilipakos - 2012 - Poverty of Ontological Reasoning

by Leonidas Tsilipakos

Oggetti, non domande: la proposta filosofica del Manifesto del nuovo realismo di Maurizio Ferraris

by Guglielmo Feis

Towards a social ontology of learning

by Martin Packer

Lave, J., & Packer, M. (2008). Towards a social ontology of learning. In K. Nielsen, S. Brinkmann, C. Elmholdt, L. Tanggaard, P. Musaeus, & G. Kraft (Eds.), A qualitative stance (pp. 17-46). Aarhus: Aarhus University Press.

Hegel's Naturalism

by Italo Testa

Paper given at the 20th Biennial Meeting of the Hegel Society of America, University of South Carolina, October 24-26, 2008 forthcoming in the Conference Proceedings, Essays on Hegel’s Philosophy of Subjective Spirit, SUNY Press (2012)

The local problem of the soul-body relation can be grasped only against the global background of the relation between... more The local problem of the soul-body relation can be grasped only against the global background of the relation between Nature and Spirit. This relates to Hegel's naturalism: the idea that there is one single reality - living reality - and different levels of description of it. This implies, moreover, that it is possible to ascribe some form of naturality also to the social body of institutionalized ethical life. Hegel’s position can thus be characterised as a kind of aristotelian social naturalism: this, at bottom, is the combined meaning of the Hegelian theses that soul is the substance of Spirit, and habit its universal form.

It Matters how you Slice it: Identity, Social Ontology, and Decomposition

by Robert Barnard

Paper version of talk for 2012 SSPP

Call the proposal that composition is identity the composition thesis.  This proposal is central to many... more Call the proposal that composition is identity the composition thesis.  This proposal is central to many contemporary discussions of the mereology of ordinary objects.  In this paper I consider three problem cases for the composition thesis, intensional entities, entities with essences, and social objects.  I suggest that while the first two cases can be addressed fairly easily by advocates of the composition thesis, the status of social entities is more problematic.  I argue that social entities are not mereologically composed, but are capable of being multiply decomposed.  I suggest that this is compatible with Searle’s suggestion that social entities realize socially constituted functional roles.

Psicología del objeto

by Baltasar Fernández-Ramírez

Draft

El construccionismo es una síntesis de orden psicosocial que lleva a conclusiones que niegan la existencia de la... more El construccionismo es una síntesis de orden psicosocial que lleva a conclusiones que niegan la existencia de la realidad tal como se concibe tradicionalmente. No es una consecuencia necesaria, pero tampoco es eludible. Si no queremos pensar en un mundo poblado por fantasmas que se resuelven únicamente en las interioridades del sujeto, necesitamos elaborar una teoría del objeto que sea capaz de incluir y al mismo tiempo de trascender las bases conceptuales del propio construccionismo. La discusión sobre el objeto es una ontología. Este texto, sin embargo, es una reflexión sobre las personas, o más bien, sobre las implicaciones del construccionismo para caracterizar el mundo de los objetos en el que las personas enmarcan su vida. Dejaré a un lado las alternativas que tienen que ver con una filosofía del lenguaje, es decir, argumentos provenientes de las ciencias del discurso, si bien es imposible sustraernos a ellas por completo, puesto que el construccionismo recibe un importante aporte de ideas desde este origen. El resultado final de mi reflexión es débil, lo reconozco, aunque prefiero considerarlo un punto de partida apto para defender un elogio de la diferencia y para matizar los riesgos solipsistas implícitos en la argumentación construccionista menos avisada.

Construccionismo. Ontología. Objetos. Personas. Nihilismo.

Reciprocity, Recognition and Relational Organicism: The Spirit of Hegelian Social Theory

by Philip Quadrio

Against Critical Realism

by Kevin Magill

Published in Capital and Class, Autumn 94, Issue 54, p113-136.

It has been claimed that the ontological theories of Roy Bhaskar can provide guiding principles for social scientists,... more It has been claimed that the ontological theories of Roy Bhaskar can provide guiding principles for social scientists, which can help steer them through errors and misconceptions. This article argues that neither Bhaskar's 'Critical Realism' nor any overarching philosophical ontology can provide workable guiding principles for social scientific research and that such principles are unnecessary.

Qui sont les individus de la politique ?

by Charles Girard

"Qui sont les individus de la politique ?", in P. Ludwig et Th. Pradeu (dir.), L'individu: Perspectives contemporaines, Paris, Vrin, Bibliothèque d'histoire de la philosophie, 2008, p. 177-203.

RESUME

L’article part de la thèse selon laquelle l’ontologie porte des enjeux pratiques décisifs pour la... more RESUME

L’article part de la thèse selon laquelle l’ontologie porte des enjeux pratiques décisifs pour la réflexion politique. La légitimité et l’efficacité des arrangements politiques dépendent en partie de leur individuation, et les idéaux normatifs présupposent des conceptions métaphysiques de l’individualité. Mais qui sont les « individus » de la politique ? En interrogeant l’individuation des entités politiques centrales convoquées par des représentants éminents de la philosophie politique classique (Aristote, Hobbes, Rousseau) et contemporaine (Tocqueville, Rawls), nous défendons deux thèses. D’une part, différentes réalités politiques, situées à divers niveaux de composition, sont des individus au sens ontologique : un homme, une association, une cité, un État sont, à des degrés variables et relativement à des propriétés différentes, des individus. L’individu humain n’est donc pas le seul individu de la politique. D’autre part, à chaque individu humain correspondent, du point de vue politique, plusieurs individus ontologiques qui sont délimités par les différents statuts politiques qui lui sont attribués et qui lui confèrent différentes propriétés normatives. Ces individus se recoupent partiellement sans coïncider exactement.

Meeting Dan Sperber’s Challenge to Searlean Social Ontology

by Guglielmo Feis

Published on "Rivista Italiana di Filosofia Analitica Junior", Vol 2, n°2 (2011). Here is the link to the original article: http://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/rifanalitica/article/view/1502/1716.
Here I corrected some spelling mistakes (I would like to thank Adriano P. Gershom Palma that notified me 'Cambridge chance' instead of 'Cambridge change' mistake through Academia).

What follows is a brief commentary to Dan Sperber's plenary lecture at ECAP7 "The deconstruction of social... more What follows is a brief commentary to Dan Sperber's plenary lecture at ECAP7 "The deconstruction of social unreality" and of his critics to Searlean social ontology. I present briefly the critics and the alternative proposal of Sperber. Then I try to develop this latter proposal from the (social) ontological point of view sketching some taxonomies for the institutional realm.

Community as the Basis of Free Individual Action.

by Kenneth R Westphal

Review of John R. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality

by Kevin Magill

Scroll down to p. 43 in pdf. Published in Radical Philosophy, 83, May/June 1997.

Social Space and the Ontology of Recognition

by Italo Testa

Draft, published in: Heikki Ikäheimo & Arto Laitinen (eds.), Recognition and Social Ontology. Brill Books, 2011 (pp. 287-308)

In this paper recognition is taken to be a question of social ontology, regarding the very constitution of the social... more In this paper recognition is taken to be a question of social ontology, regarding the very constitution of the social space of interaction. I concentrate on the question of whether certain aspects of the theory of recognition can be translated into the terms of a socio-ontological paradigm: to do so, I make reference to some conceptual tools derived from John Searle's social ontology and Robert Brandom's normative pragmatics. My strategy consists in showing that recognitive phenomena cannot be isolated at the level of human interaction, and are, rather, in part proper to animal interaction as well. Furthermore, it is argued that recognitive powers are constitutive powers more basic than deontic ones and play a role much broader than the one they in fact assume in Searle and in Brandom.

Phenomenology and the Body Politic

by Timo Miettinen

published in Philosophy Today 2011

Understanding the Social Constitution of the Human Individual

by Jo-Jo Koo

Dissertation

What does it mean to say that the human individual is socially constituted? I argue that the very capacity to be a... more What does it mean to say that the human individual is socially constituted? I argue that the very capacity to be a human agent and self must draw on a shared public understanding of the practices, norms, and roles that renders this capacity intelligible in the first place. Contrary to what we commonly assume, interpersonal interactions cannot serve as the basis for an adequate understanding of human sociality. For in order to engage in such interactions, individuals have to be already socially constituted.

In Part I, Ch. 1, of the dissertation, I elaborate and endorse two theses of Philip Pettit’s regarding how we should think about the social constitution of the individual. First, we should not think the latter consists merely in the fact that human beings depend causally, materially, psychologically, institutionally, etc., on one another for their survival and minimal flourishing. Second, establishing that the individual is socially constituted turns on showing how some basic capacity that is central for being human cannot be actualized absent this constitution, not how this individual is somehow subservient as a part or aspect of some larger social whole. Pettit, however, identifies the capacity in question as the capacity to think, which (he argues) is social insofar as it rests on a basis of social interactions. Against that, I argue that the relevant capacity is our very ability to be in the world.

I spell this out in Ch. 2 by drawing on Heidegger’s conception of human social existence in Being and Time. I argue first that the social constitution of the individual can be adequately understood only when it is seen as an inherent aspect of what is required for a human being to be in the world at all. I then explain the crucial function of the shared public normativity on the basis of which the individual makes sense of things in the world, including herself and her relations with others. I show how the individual is socially constituted in that her understanding of this normative intelligibility is at once what makes available and what constrains the attitudes, actions, self-understandings, and projects that she can adopt. Contrary to its initial appearance, this understanding of the social constitution of the individual does not preclude resistance to norms, but is what actually renders this resistance intelligible in the first place. I conclude this chapter by addressing some familiar objections raised by some philosophers in the “continental” tradition (e.g., Sartre, Buber, Theunissen, Rentsch, Levinas) against a Heideggerian conception of human social existence.

In Part II of the dissertation, I consider various forms of the interactionist understanding of human sociality that I argued against, on general grounds, in Part I. In Ch. 3, I sketch and criticize the interactionist accounts of collective intentionality that Margaret Gilbert, Raimo Tuomela, and John Searle provide. I argue that these accounts are not only problematic by being either explanatorily circular or incomplete, but fundamentally flawed by assuming that individual agency can be intelligible and fully self-sufficient apart from its social constitution in the sense worked out in Part I.

In Ch. 4 I examine how Donald Davidson’s commitment to a form of interactionism shapes his account of successful linguistic communication and the objectivity of thought. I show that shared practices in the Heideggerian sense do not fall into the target range of Davidson’s attack on the idea that communication presupposes shared practices; moreover, shared practices in the Heideggerian sense actually enable the occurrence of such communication in ways that Davidson unjustifiably downplays. I trace his lack of appreciation of the significance of shared practices in this sense to his commitment to an interactionist conception of sociality. This commitment is also at work in his appeal to “triangulation” as a necessary condition for the objectivity of thought. I argue that this appeal, even on its own terms, either does no actual explanatory work or leaves mysterious how triangulation is supposed to be a necessary condition of thought.

In Ch. 5 I consider in greater depth how normativity connects with the social constitution of the individual. I approach this topic by sketching the contrast between individualist and communalist conceptions of rule-following that stem from divergent readings of the later Wittgenstein. I examine in particular the views of Michael Luntley and Meredith Williams, two sophisticated defenders, respectively, of individualism and communalism about the normativity of rule-following. Luntley mounts a devastating attack against standard appeals to the community as the source of normativity. In response, I take what is right about Luntley’s positive account of normativity and, contrary to what he holds, show how it actually coalesces with Williams’s best thinking about the social dimension of normativity. The result is a conception of normativity that not only integrates well with the Heideggerian conception of the social constitution of the individual, but deepens our understanding of the connection between normativity and normalization in this constitution.

The Ontology Maturing Approach for Collaborative and Work Integrated Ontology Development: Evaluation Results and Future Directions

by Andreas Schmidt

Ontology Maturing: a Collaborative Web 2.0 Approach to Ontology Engineering

by Andreas Schmidt

Most of the current methodologies for building ontologies rely on specialized knowledge engineers. This is in contrast... more Most of the current methodologies for building ontologies rely on specialized knowledge engineers. This is in contrast to real-world settings, where the need for maintenance of domain specific ontologies emerges in the daily work of users. But in order to allow for participatory ontology engineering, we need to have a more realistic conceptual model of how ontologies develop in the real world. We introduce the ontology maturing processes which is based on the insight that ontology engineering is a collaborative informal learning process and for which we analyze characteristic evolution steps and triggers that have users engage in ontology engineering within their everyday work processes. This model integrates tagging and folksonomies with formal ontologies and shows maturing pathways between them. As implementations of this model, we present two case studies and the corresponding tools. The first is about image-based ontology engineering (introducing so-called imagenotions), the second about ontology-enabled social bookmarking (SOBOLEO). Both of them are inspired by lightweight Web 2.0 approaches and allow for realtime collaboration.

An Unbecoming Introduction

by John Ricco

Documentare la documentalità prima del collasso ontologico [review of Documentalità by Maurizio Ferraris]

by Guglielmo Feis

Critical review of Ferraris' work on social ontology (Documentalità. Perchè è necessario lasciar tracce]. In the first... more Critical review of Ferraris' work on social ontology (Documentalità. Perchè è necessario lasciar tracce]. In the first section I present the 11 thesis stated by Ferraris in his book. The second section (2-2.6) outlines Ferraris' main ideas on social ontology and his formula "(social) object = written act". The third section (3-3.2) reports Ferraris' criticisms to John Searle's X counts as Y theory of social objects and to Barry Smith's fiat object theory.
In the last paragraph I challenge Ferraris with my biggest doubt. To me it seems that his ontology is too broad and allows too many objects to be socializable. The motto we can sum up his proposal sounds like "everything exists (as a social objects)".