Social Ontology Research Articles

Provincializing white racial ideology: Mills’ social ontology and philosophy of education

Social ontology examines the nature and mechanisms in human society of concepts that pertain to various kinds of social collectivities. A pioneer in the development of this philosophical field, Mills theorised a social metaphysics of racial constructivism for modern philosophy in order to explain the enduring orthodoxies of its Anglo-centric dominance. This paper invokes the term, supervenience, to further elucidate the causal bearing of race on individual and social facts. Turning to the philosophy of education, the ontological bifurcation of asymmetrical racial worlds is a salient divide to which discourses of normative individual ethics, analytic critical thinking, and generalized social justice contribute. Given the pervasiveness of supervenience, in the unwillingness to traffic in the ontology of race, educational philosophy hamstrings the creative and critical dimensions of advancing education for a racially equitable and pluralistic democracy.

Coordination as Naturalistic Social Ontology: Constraints and Explanation

In the paper, I propose a project of social coordination as naturalistic social ontology (CNSO) based on the rules-in-equilibria theory of social institutions (Guala and Hindriks 2015; Hindriks and Guala 2015). It takes coordination as the main ontological unit of the social, a mechanism homological across animals and humans, for both can handle coordination problems: in the forms of “animal conventions” and social institutions, respectively. On this account, institutions are correlated equilibria with normative force. However, if both humans and animals solve coordination problems in a similar way, and only humans have social institutions, how do the latter evolve? I suggest identifying possible causes of this evolution among cognitive capacities like mindreading and imitation by building dynamic models. Social ontology becomes constrained by the evolution of the forms of coordination and by the cognitive mechanisms involved in the emergence and persistence of social institutions. It means that it becomes bound to what might be derived from social institutions, i.e., social roles, structures and their derivatives. It shows how conceptual relations might emerge from causal. I conclude the paper with the discussion of the relationship between involved types of explanation, mechanistic and equilibrium ones.

Social Ontology and Evaluation—A Comment on “Framing Evaluation in Reality: An Introduction to Ontologically Integrative Evaluation”

According to Jennifer Billman, western evaluation bias against indigenous thinking is due to ontological incompetence. If so, the solution she offers (a highly abstract list of criteria) is inadequate since it fails to address let alone resolve a wide range of philosophical dilemmas at the intersection of logic and ontology. Furthermore, it fails to “frame evaluation in reality” since it ignores the patent fact that, in the market society, positivist evaluators dominate. They are value free, embrace a “clockwork” conception of the natural and social world, and do not question decision makers' goals. By contrast, constructivist evaluators recognize that social facts differ from natural facts since they are socially constructed and clustered within institutions that define roles, norms and expectations. It follows that constructivist evaluation holds the key to the problem identified by Billman since it resists capture by vested interests, gives pride of place to the relational context and embraces the validity of indigenous thinking.

Postcapitalist Projects: Ontology vs. Ideology

Introduction. The crisis of capitalist social formation determines the relevance of projecting the post-capitalist society. The article reveals the advantage of socio-ontological approach over ideological approach to this projecting. At the same time the new problem of sociocultural conceptualization of post-capitalist reality in the language of capitalist culture is raised.Methodology and sources. The problem of postcapitalist inter-formation transition was originated within Marxism, and it can only be solved by means of its socio-philosophical selfcritique. The leaders of such self-criticism on the issue of the ideological expression of postcapitalist projects are A.A. Koryakovtsev, S.V. Viskunov, P.N. Kondrashov, D.A. Davydov, I. Yakhot and J. Holloway. Any scientific socio-ontological analysis of the current interformational transition relies on generalized empirical data from special sciences and social-historical practice.Results and discussion. The postcapitalist agenda corresponds to the principle of metapolitics, potentially allowing us to transcend the influence of the wide range of ideologies used by capital to protect itself. In principle, no ideology can precisely point the way for the post-capitalist transformation of society, since social being is always more substantive and more unpredictable than social consciousness. Ultimately, the new is an objective process and the result of life itself, not the violence of human thought over life. What in the spiritual realm is truly capable of moving beyond capitalism must seem, at the very least, strange to those people whom capitalism has shaped. And the most important of post-capitalist ideas should not be conceptualized in the language of capitalist culture at all. The objective content of the driving forces of social development is conceptualized in Marxist social ontology by means of the concept of “productive forces”. The most important of the productive forces is human being. Social formation is a special way of organization of person's essential forces, and therefore the inter-formation transition has an anthropological nature. The development of labor up to the state of universal labor and formation of other essential forces leads to the decomposition of capitalism.Conclusion. A condition of social success of post-capitalist projects is the change of ideological motivation into an ontological motivation – all current social problems should be reconsidered “from the perspective” of the development of productive forces.

The Possibility of Interreligious Dialogue: A Philosophical Foundation

The possibility of interreligious dialogue depends, at least, on the justification for the existence of religion itself. Thus, the constructionist theory of religion becomes a fundamental problem in constructing a framework of interreligious dialogue theory because religion is expressed as an imaginary existence, in the sense that it is only the construction of scholars and academics. If the existence of religion itself cannot be justified ontologically, it means that interreligious dialogue is impossible. Hence, to answer that problem, we inevitably have to prove ontologically the existence of religion without having to reject the constructionist theory. In this paper, I use the social ontology analysis proposed by John Searle and the historical ontology theory proposed by Ian Hacking to prove that religion as a constructed social reality exists objectively. Thus, interreligious dialogue is possible within a framework of existential hermeneutics that presupposes a process of understanding that changes continuously in accordance with historical ontology as its foundation.

The Kurdish Janus: The intersocietal construction of nations

AbstractExisting accounts of Kurdish nationalism can be mapped onto the main theories of nationalism, that is, primordialism, ethnosymbolism and modernism. These theories, however, suffer, respectively, from essentialism, circularity and aporia, manifest in their common inability to digest the Janus‐like character of nations, that is, their display of simultaneous modernity and antiquity. This paper develops an alternative account through a critical application of the theory of ‘uneven and combined development’ (UCD) to the Republic of Kurdistan of 1946. The argument unfolds in three steps. First, we argue that the failure of mainstream theories of nationalism to explain the nation's historical ambiguity lies in their ‘internalism’. Second, we show that UCD overcomes internalism through its plural social ontology and enables a retheorising of nations as interactive products of the geopolitical mediation of historical capitalism's expansion through societal multiplicity. Central to this process was the emergence of nationalism as a defensive and emulative ideology of geopolitical self‐preservation. This involved reversing the sociological and political moments of the originary formation of the British imperial nation. We argue that this historical reversal underpins the Janus‐like form of nations, including the Kurdish nation. Third, we substantiate the argument through a brief case study of the Republic of Kurdistan.

‘SOVEREIGNTY’ AND ‘OWNERSHIP’ AS THE ELEMENTS OF SOCIAL ONTOLOGY

The paper endeavors to offer a justification of social ontology as a true and universal form of philosophic thinking. As the two backbone notions of it I suggest ‘sovereignty’ and ‘ownership’ that are held in agreement by ‘activity’. In the introduction, an axiomatic assumption is introduced that asserts the essential identity of thinking (consciousness) and communication, which is a universal and integral handicap of activity that transforms the spontaneous uncertainty of being into the arranged certainty of the world. In the context of such an approach, thinking as communication is understood not so much functionally as substantially. At the same time, communication as thinking embodies the principle of a sovereign personality, which, in the horizon of social space, is carried out in the institution of property, covering both the totality of a person's inner content and the system of his relations with the surrounding world. Moreover, the ‘surrounding world’ is interpreted in the broadest sense as a set of indefinite objects translated into a system of broadcasting things. Herein I try to demonstrate the historical retrospective of social ontology through contemplation of these categories. A particular importance is given to the substance of ‘ownership’ and to modernity in the bourgeois civilization pointing to the fundamental contradictions in their respective actualization. In particular, the article emphasizes that in the era of modernity of postmodernity, in the conditions of bourgeois and post-bourgeois society, the mechanism of ‘mastering’ as a form of actualization of the institution of property and the assertion of a sovereign personality is consistently transformed into a mechanism of ‘appropriation’. This mutation becomes the cause of personality desuverenization. According to the authors, the desuverenization of personality is carried out in the mode of ‘alienation’ or exploitation, in the broad sense of the word, of the basic content of a person as a being who maintains the order of being through free implementing activity.

Introduction: From Social Ontology to Mathematical Practice, and Back Again

Introduction: From Social Ontology to Mathematical Practice, and Back Again

No Magic: From Phenomenology of Practice to Social Ontology of Mathematics

The paper shows how to use the Husserlian phenomenological method in contemporary philosophical approaches to mathematical practice and mathematical ontology. First, the paper develops the phenomenological approach based on Husserl's writings to obtain a method for understanding mathematical practice. Then, to put forward a full-fledged ontology of mathematics, the phenomenological approach is complemented with social ontological considerations. The proposed ontological account sees mathematical objects as social constructions in the sense that they are products of culturally shared and historically developed practices. At the same time the view endorses the sense that mathematical reality is given to mathematicians with a sense of independence. As mathematical social constructions are products of highly constrained, intersubjective practices and accord with the phenomenologically clarified experience of mathematicians, positing them is phenomenologically justified. The social ontological approach offers a way to build mathematical ontology out of the practice with no metaphysical magic.

Of Marriage and Mathematics: Inferentialism and Social Ontology

The semantic inferentialist account of the social institution of semantic meaning can be naturally extended to account for social ontology. I argue here that semantic inferentialism provides a framework within which mathematical ontology can be understood as social ontology, and mathematical facts as socially instituted facts. I argue further that the semantic inferentialist framework provides resources to underpin at least some aspects of the objectivity of mathematics, even when the truth of mathematical claims is understood as socially instituted.

Meaningful knowledge about public administration: Epistemological and methodological antecedents

While scientific knowledge has become valuable in creating national and global policies, the influence of Public Administration knowledge may be perceived as limited and thus not meaningful. This study aimed to understand the epistemological and methodological antecedents for meaningful knowledge about public administration. It departed from two assumptions, namely that of a social ontology of a complex, emerging and socially constructed public administration reality, and that of the co-situatedness of scholars, administrators, politicians and citizens in the public administration reality. The current study has shown that a situated knowledge quest for this reality implies, firstly, an extended epistemology to recognize and consider all forms of tangible and non-tangible knowledge about public administration within relevant contexts. Secondly, it implies an interscience methodology drawing from multi- and transdisciplinary traditions for comprehensive knowledge about public administration within relevant contexts. Meaningful knowledge about public administration can influence public policy only if (a) it is consistent with the social ontology of this reality, (b) it is of value for the situated and interconnected knowledge stakeholders, (c) this emerging, irreducible and complex reality is explored through an extended epistemology, and (d) results from a methodology of interscience and complex thinking.

Утверждение онтологии “международного” на основе радикального конструктивизма

The “International Relations” (“IR”) discipline is going through a double-disciplinary crisis. Once again, there is a general feeling of increasingly fragmenting common ground within the discipline (the first crisis) and the acknowledgment that the “IR” only imports concepts and methods from other disciplines but does not export any (the second crisis). Both crises share the same origin. The subject matter – “international” – has not been rooted in any social ontology. The discipline is now searching for the social ontology of “international.” The most discussed candidate for such a role is “societal multiplicity”, a product of “uneven and combined development”. The article offers an alternative variant of the social ontology for “international,” which is based on Niklas Luhmann’s system theory and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s social theory. It argues that “international” is rooted in the segmentary systemic differentiation between inside and outside and in the struggle for recognition of these segments. The semantic marker for this ontology is “sovereignty.” In this way, “sovereignty” turns into a systemic program (in Luhmann’s terms) of international politics (as a subsystem of the world society political system), designating the common ground for the discipline and marking social processes and phenomena, which can be studied within the “IR”. This will allow the “International Relations” to export some of its concepts and methods to other social science disciplines. The article critically engages with the Theory of World Politics by Mathias Albert, reconstructing it to meet the challenge of the double-disciplinary crisis. The “balance of power” is criticized with the help of Michel Foucault, who showed: that among European powers in 19th-century Europe, the balance of power, responsible for producing international order, was linked with the police inside states, responsible for producing domestic order. Nevertheless, to keep the balance of power and to secure the domestic order, states and police used the same technique of observation – statistics, making the “balance of power” a non-autopoietic system program incapable of producing an autopoietic system of international relations. “Sovereignty” also spans both realms of the inside/outside divide but is observed mainly through external recognition and is rooted in the social ontology of “international.” The article argues that “sovereignty” is better suited for the system program of international politics than the “balance of power”.

Математика как инструмент социальных исследований: к новому пониманию социальной реальности

The article explores the current state of mathematization in the social sciences and social applied analytics. Mathematics in social sciences and in social analytics represents the set of instrumental methods that help to obtain results, in contradiction to understanding of mathematics as critical doubt (the requirement of rigor as a doubt of methods correctness). In social sciences and analytics the results are obtained, not critically reasoning. Mathematics in social research is understood as useful methods, and not as theories that ensure the rigor of the application of mathematical methods. The understanding of the object of mathematics that is elaborated in social sciences also is far from classical concepts of philosophy of mathematics: mathematical objects as ideal entities, as formal constructions, as a priory synthetic, does not dominate. It is revealed that under the influence of practice of mathematical methods application in social research, the new image of social reality and of social ontology appears. Social reality starting to be understood as measured and the social relations as based on social comparability, because the relations are drawn up from the networks of social actors actions that are possessed by quantitatively comparable rights and responsibilities, values, opinions, beliefs, priorities, etc. Moreover, some researchers believe that for social phenomena that do not have measurable indicators, social reality has not yet formed, it is still amorphous, not homogeneous, has not acquired properties of stability, resistance to disturbing influences. Finally, the applicability of mathematics in social research is pushing researchers toward belief that social ontology, whether or not it is understood in an essentialist way, or in “flat ontology” construction (Bruno Latour), is presented in quantitative forms.

Ontologia społeczna w świetle filozofii Romana Ingardena

W ontologii społecznej prowadzi się dociekania nad tym, jak istnieją fakty społeczne i instytucjonalne, czym jest grupa społeczna, czy intencjonalność kolektywna. Fenomenologia jest jednym z XX-wiecznych nurtów filozoficznych, których wkład jej przedstawicieli nad wspomnianymi zagadnieniami należy uznać za znaczący (m.in. von Hildebrandta, Reinacha, Schelera, Stein). Celem niniejszego artykułu było rozważenie możliwego wkładu Ingardena w ontologię społeczną. Artykuł składa się z dwóch części: przeglądowej i interpretacyjnej. W pierwszej w ramach wstępu wskazałem, dlaczego fenomenologię błędnie uważa się za „aspołeczną”. W drugiej zrekonstruowałem poglądy metaontologiczne Ingardena z jego opus magnum – Sporu o istnienie świata. Zgodnie z deklaracją z tego dzieła przedmioty społeczno-prawne stanowią dziedzinę bytów o elementach heteronomicznych i czysto intencjonalnych. W artykule ukazałem, że Ingarden explicite nie formułuje teorii bytu społecznego, ale na kanwie jego ontologii szkic takiej można spróbować przedstawić. Uznałem, że w celu realizacji tego zamierzenia należy podjąć próbę nakreślenia różnicy między przedmiotami fikcji, a przedmiotami społeczno-prawnym w ramach jego ontologii.

Two-Dimensional Theories of Art in advance

What determines whether an object is an artwork? In this paper I consider what I will call ‘social’ theories of art, according to which the arthood of objects depends in some way on the art-related social practices that we have. Though such a dependence claim is plausible in principle, social theories of art tend to unpack the determining link between artworks and social practices in terms of intentional relations between the objects in question and the people involved in the relevant practices. This intentionalism has unappealing upshots. Drawing on two-dimensional approaches in social ontology, I show how social theories of art can be done differently, improving their prospects.

“Lifeworld” in the coordinates of modern existential sociology

The aim is to study the possibilities and limitations of the definition of the "life world" in the content and semantic coordinates of modern existential sociology. Relevance: in the humanities, there is a "turn" — a turn towards "new existentialism", which is associated with the processes of "ontologization" of sociological science. In view of this, the definition of the "life world" acquires a special, non-trivial status for explaining and understanding the features of the modern existence of the individual and community. Objectives: the articles reinterpret the key ideas of existential sociology from the perspective of the difference between its subject and the subjects of other existential sciences — anthropology, psychology, philosophy, ethnography. Methodology — analysis of the principles, prerequisites, approaches, ideas of the leading representatives of the existential direction. Results: the author’s program has been developed, identifying the key parameters of the existential human model in sociology based on interpretations of the meanings of social reality considered through the prism of the coordinates of the social ontology of everyday life: individualism — collectivism; rational — irrational, using the conceptual and categorical apparatus: authenticity; situation; choice; actions; experience; feelings and emotions; self; body; structure; culture; religion, freedom, space and time; social changes, manifestations of being ("existentials"), massification, leveling. Theoretical and practical significance — the development of research algorithms that reflect individual and collective actions in the paradigm of the "life world", the presentation of a set of concepts in the chosen logic of presentation, which explains how and why existential sociology can be structured at macro-, micro- and meso- levels, can be presented in the middle range theories, in non-standard formats of visual, relational and sensory sociology; stated in negative and positive terms. The main methods are based on typical techniques of critical discourse analysis and frame analysis. Scientific novelty: despite the presence of various parameters of the life world and the corresponding modes of existence of individuals and communities, both these constructs themselves and their relationships have not yet been studied at sufficiently deep levels in the scientific community. The main conclusions of the article are the discovery of new conceptual spaces by existential sociological theory in the study of social mechanisms of synthesis of "soft" and "hard" versions of "structural bias", which explain the formation and determination of individual and group decisions by certain structural forces. The authors’ scientific contributions are in the fact that new possibilities of the definition of the "life world" are indicated to be presented in the coordinate framework of various sociological theories, including modern existential sociology.

Analytic Ecclesiology: The Paradox of the Unity of the Church

Analytic Ecclesiology is a new branch within the enter­prise of Analytic Theology. The “analytic” part of the name refers to the analytic method employed to explicate the core claims of Christian theology using the tools of analytic philosophy. In the case of Eccle­siology, the concept of ecclesiastical unity demands cla­rification. The question is not why or how a collection of indi­viduals is united but in what sense they are one. The Scriptural answer to the former is that Christ is the head of the Church. It is the latter that Analytic Ecclesiology is committed to answering. Joshua Cockayne’s work, which focuses on the social ontology and group agency of the Church, has shed some light on the issue. He invites philosophers and theologians in the analytic tradition to think about Ecclesiology analytically. That is my aim in this paper. I hope to expand the discussion on Analytic Ecclesiology, not by building on Cockayne’s work, but rather by taking a step back and arguing that the issue of the unity of the Church must be discussed from the perspective of identity rather than, contra Cockayne, from the perspective of group agency. To achieve this, I shall first assess Cockayne’s account and offer my criticism. Then, drawing insights from Peter Unger’s article “Problem of the Many,” I dis­cuss the paradox of the unity of the Church and conclude that relative identity theory best solves the paradox of the unity of the Church.

Badiou´s Social Ontology: Another Theory of the Subject

This article tackles a thorny issue within the reception of Badiou’s philosophy, i.e., the question of the role of the “social” within the ontological framework it outlines. Acknowledging that the question of the social is underdeveloped in Badiou’s system, the paper argues that there are resources in it to develop a social ontology, and attempos to flesh it out through an original and sustained reading of Badiou’s key formula on the distinction between democratic materialism and materialist dialectic: “there are only bodies and languages, except that there are truths”.

Badiou’s Social Ontology: Another Theory of the Subject

This article tackles a thorny issue within the reception of Badiou’s philosophy, i.e., the question of the role of the “social” within the ontological framework it outlines. Acknowledging that the question of the social is underdeveloped in Badiou’s system, the paper argues that there are resources in it to develop a social ontology, and attempos to flesh it out through an original and sustained reading of Badiou’s key formula on the distinction between democratic materialism and materialist dialectic: “there are only bodies and languages, except that there are truths”.

Social Inconsistency

Though the social world is real and objective, the way that social facts arise out of other facts is in an important way shaped by human thought, talk and behaviour. Building on recent work in social ontology, I describe a mechanism whereby this distinctive malleability of social facts, combined with the possibility of basic human error, makes it possible for a consistent physical reality to ground an inconsistent social reality. I explore various ways of resisting the prima facie case for social inconsistency. I conclude, however, that the prima facie case survives scrutiny, and draw out some of the ramifications.