Perspectives on Social Ontology and Social Cognition

1987

The thesis pursued in this dissertation raises and examines a specific philosophical problem, essential to the study of the ontology of the social world. This problem has its origin in the question: 'how is is possible that the social world is constituted as a. unified totality or complex whole?'. It is argued that the defining feature of a viable theory of social holism is that it is able to posit this metaphysical kind of problem. In this sense, the holist discourse that provides the terms for expressing the meaningfulness of this problem or the conditions of its legitimacy is, equivalently, an attempt to answer it, giving the form of the social world as an ontological domain. Thus this thesis discloses what is here proposed as the formal ontology of social reality and investigates the cluster of issues relevant to this. The study consists of three related stages (Parts). Part One spells out the formal mode of ontological inquiring and lays down the metatheoretical validity of holism. On the one hand, the principal idea is that the introduction of certain principles of relationality and of the "moment/whole" problematic establishes the basis of a non-extensional constitution of the social world; it is essential that individuals have the formal character of "entelechial Leibnizian monads" being in conceptual communication. On the other hand, the status of holist categories and commitments involves a transcendental mode of reasoning on the metaphysics of the social world. Part Two examines the three necessary moments of the conceptual communication in virtue of which individuals are constituted as essentially social persons. The first concerns the cluster of sociocultural concepts, the second the possibility of meaningful linguistic expression and the third the intentionality of thought. It is argued that by means of this notion of entelechial social personhood the categories of the 'individual' and the 'social' are integrated so that: a 'fact' about the individual's mind is not something enclosed within it, and the 'social' is not an empirically given environment 'containing' or causally influencing the mind. Part Three completes this holist non-extensional/non-atomic ontology by incorporating the semantics of the language of events characterizing the complex form of social states of affairs. Social events are shown to be complex wholes irreducible to their subjects. Furthermore, the temporal identity of the social world in the course of historical change depends on the reality of events; the interconnection of social events instantiates an intensional nexus of relations between ineliminable social properties.

Social interaction and the development of knowledge, 2004

Persons are biological beings who participate in social environments. Is human sociality different from that of insects? Is human sociality different from that of a computer or robot with elaborate rules for social interaction in its program memory? What is the relationship between the biology of humans and the sociality of persons? I argue that persons constitute an emergent ontological level that develops out of the biological and psychological realm, but that is largely social in its own constitution. This requires a characterization of the relationships between the bio/psychological and the social, and of the developmental process of emergence. It also requires a framework for modeling the bio/psychological level that makes any such emergence possible. Neither attachment theory nor information processing frameworks, for example, will do -the major orientations toward human sociality today make understanding that sociality ultimately impossible.

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.

Signs and Society, 2014

Searle’s social ontology concerns the question of how it is that we are to reconcile different aspects of reality but takes for granted a particular kind of naturalism based on his unexplicated “basic facts” of nature. The consequence of this approach is that Searle’s ontology deals specifically with social reality and its institutions, and never directly with the basic facts upon which his position rests. Paradoxically, this naturalistic assumption alienates his theory from its connection with the basic facts because the nature of this connection is taken for granted and not explicitly shown how nature is connectable to the social world. I hope to show that Searle’s project is redeemed by biosemiotic theory that makes an explicit connection between the beginnings of sociality, which is where Searle’s work starts off, and the biological and physical nature of things, which is what Searle’s work takes for granted but what biosemiotics explicates.

The aim of this article is to highlight the contributions that Roman Ingarden could make to social ontology. In achieving this objective, I shall juxtapose his conceptual apparatus from existential ontology (Ingarden, 1947/2013, 1948/2016) with Searle’s (1995, 2010) model of theory of institutional facts. I shall define that Searle’s (1995) approach to social reality is ontologically deflationary. When referring to an ontological assumption of such a model, it becomes problematic to explain how a social entity such as a corporation exists (Smith, 2003; Smith & Searle, 2003). Consequently, he modifies his position by acknowledging that a corporation comes into being by a declaration and does not need a physical entity to continue to exist (Searle, 2010). On the grounds of his existential ontology, Ingarden distinguishes between relations (existential moments): self-sufficient and dependent. In my paper, I shall point out that this distinction allows for a more accurate description of the mode of being of social entities, such as corporations. Searle did not make such a distinction explicitly on the grounds of his naturalistic ontology. In this paper, I shall describe the mode of existence of the corporation as a purely intentional object.

Social Anthropology, 2015

s Anthropology and the Cognitive Challenge (Bloch 2012) is a luminous essay about the tumultuous relationships between cultural anthropology and disciplines more oriented towards the natural sciences. In a theoretical tour-de-force, Bloch's clear writing allows the reader to better understand why most anthropologists are so reluctant to take into account naturalistic attempts to specify what makes us human.

Recognition and Social Ontology, 2011

Synthese

We propose a bridge-builder perspective on social ontology. Our point of departure is that an important task of philosophy is to provide the bigger picture. To this end, it should investigate folk views and determine whether and how they can be preserved once scrutinized from the perspective of the sciences. However, the sciences typically present us with a fragmented picture of reality. Thus, an important intermediate step is to integrate the most promising social scientific theories with one another. In addition to this, social ontology can provide input to and benefit from other philosophical disciplines that engage in normative theorizing. Thus, we propose that social ontology connects not only with folk ontology and scientific ontology but also with fields such as ethics and political philosophy. Building bridges between them serves to formulate a credible and encompassing worldview that is of theoretical and practical significance.

Mechane, 2024

In his book Documentality, Ferraris imagines a wedding scenario where all participants have Alzheimer. The ceremony proceeds as normal, and by its end, a new husband and wife exist. However, the next morning, the spouses forget everything. This scenario underscores the importance of writing in Ferraris’ theory. A recorded document, such as a marriage certificate, could confirm their marriage. Ferraris’ approach to documentality and social ontology illustrates that if the discovery of this document occurred after the death of the spouses, it would confirm a real marriage in which the spouses were unaware they had been married (§§ 1-2). The central question addressed in this paper is: Can documentation replace the deontic and constitutive functions of language? Searle’s philosophy of society, through his philosophy of language and mind, will be examined to discuss how language creates social objects via collective intentionality (§§ 3-6). It is precisely language, with its inherent deontology, that enables the existence of real marriages even without recorded evidence (§ 7-9).