Social Properties (Facts and Entities): Philosophical Aspects

Abstract

Ontology is the philosophical study of what exists. All thought and all discourse presuppose the existence of certain things, entities, in order for at least some part of that thought or discourse to be true. Thought and discourse, both ordinary and scientific, about the social world are no exception. But it is one thing to admit that there are such entities as France, the United Nations, and the Icelandic working class, and that one cannot eliminate such reference, but quite another to insist that they cannot be reductively identified with something more respectable. What must be done, I think, is to evaluate each reductive strategy that suggests itself, one-by-one. We can also think or speak of either social or nonsocial entities like Socrates or the tallest building and, in either case, ascribe social properties to them: for example, ‘France is a charter member of the UN’ ascribes to a pair of social entities, France and the United Nations, the relational social property of being a charter member of. Could each social property be reductively identified either with some specific nonsocial property, or with some finite Boolean construction of such? I doubt whether this could be so. Often, the positions described in the relevant literature about social ontology are posed in terms of individualism and holism, sometimes with the qualifying adjective, ‘methodological’ added. Sometimes, the positions are expressed in terms of facts; at other times, in terms of entities. Supervenience claims for the social (‘the social supervenes on the nonsocial’) are sometimes posed in terms of facts, at other times in terms of properties. It might be claimed that there are no irreducible social facts, or that there are no irreducible social entities or that there are no irreducible social properties. The positions are not equivalent. Rarely, if at all, is the distinction drawn between the existence of entities, properties, and facts. Does individualism in the social sciences eschew social entities but admit irreducible social properties? Or should it eschew both? What should it say about facts? Might there be distinct versions of individualism, so that it comes in stronger and weaker forms?