Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-hc48f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T14:47:34.441Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Social Objects, Response-Dependence, and Realism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 November 2020

ASYA PASSINSKY
ASYA PASSINSKY*
Affiliation:
UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHAPEL [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

There is a widespread sentiment that social objects such as nation-states, borders, and pieces of money are just figments of our collective imagination and not really ‘out there’ in the world. Call this the ‘antirealist intuition’. Eliminativist, reductive materialist, and immaterialist views of social objects can all make sense of the antirealist intuition, in one way or another. But these views face serious difficulties. A promising alternative view is nonreductive materialism. Yet it is unclear whether and how nonreductive materialists can make sense of the antirealist intuition. I develop a version of nonreductive materialism that is able to meet this explanatory demand. The central idea is that social objects are materially constituted, response-dependent objects. I go on to offer an independent argument in favor of this response-dependent view of social objects. I then suggest that a proponent of this view can appeal to the response-dependent nature of social objects to explain, or explain away, the antirealist intuition.

Keywords

metaphysicsontologymaterial constitutionsocial metaphysicssocial ontology
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of the American Philosophical Association , Volume 6 , Issue 4 , Winter 2020 , pp. 431 - 443
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © American Philosophical Association 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

I would like to thank audiences at the City University of New York, Dartmouth College, Humboldt University, New York University, Princeton University, and the University of Victoria, where versions of this material were presented. For helpful comments and discussion, I would also like to thank Paul Boghossian, David Chalmers, Robin Dembroff, Cian Dorr, Simon Evnine, Yu Guo, Eric Hochstein, Daniel Hoek, Daniel Korman, Uriah Kriegel, Marko Malink, Ned Markosian, Annette Martín, Philip Pettit, Michael Raven, Katherine Ritchie, Chelsea Rosenthal, Jonathan Schaffer, Erica Shumener, Vid Simoniti, Alexander Skiles, Olla Solomyak, Amie Thomasson, David Velleman, Jared Warren, Daniel Waxman, and two anonymous referees for the Journal of the American Philosophical Association. The ideas in this paper go back to my doctoral dissertation, and I am especially grateful to my advisor Kit Fine for his invaluable feedback.

References

Ásta. (2018) Categories We Live By: The Construction of Sex, Gender, Race, and Other Social Categories. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Baker, Lynne Rudder. (1997) ‘Why Constitution is Not Identity’. Journal of Philosophy, 94, 599–621.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baker, Lynne Rudder. (2004) ‘The Ontology of Artifacts’. Philosophical Explorations, 7, 99–111.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barnes, Elizabeth. (2017) ‘Realism and Social Structure’. Philosophical Studies, 174, 2417–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Epstein, Brian. (2015) The Ant Trap: Rebuilding the Foundations of the Social Sciences. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Evnine, Simon J. (2016) Making Objects and Events: A Hylomorphic Theory of Artifacts, Actions, and Organisms. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fine, Kit. (1994) ‘Essence and Modality’. Philosophical Perspectives, 8, 1–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fine, Kit. (2001) ‘The Question of Realism’. Philosophers’ Imprint, 1, 1–30.Google Scholar
Fine, Kit. (2003) ‘The Non-Identity of a Material Thing and Its Matter’. Mind, 112, 195–234.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hamilton, William. (2013, July 22) [Cartoon]. The New Yorker. Retrieved from https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/07/22.Google Scholar
Haslanger, Sally. (2018) ‘Social Explanation: Structures, Stories, and Ontology. A Reply to Díaz León, Saul, and Sterken’. Disputatio, 10, 245–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hayek, F.A. (1943) ‘The Facts of the Social Sciences’. Ethics, 54, 1–13.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hieronymi, Pamela. (2006) ‘Controlling Attitudes’. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 87, 45–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hilpinen, Risto. (1993) ‘Authors and Artifacts’. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 93, 155–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hindriks, Frank. (2006) ‘Acceptance-Dependence: A Social Kind of Response-Dependence’. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 87, 481–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hindriks, Frank. (2013) ‘The Location Problem in Social Ontology’. Synthese, 190, 413–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Johnston, Mark. (1992) ‘Constitution is Not Identity’. Mind, 101, 89–105.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Johnston, Mark. (1993) ‘Objectivity Refigured: Pragmatism without Verificationism’. In Haldane, John and Wright, Crispin (eds.), Reality, Representation, and Projection (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 85–130.Google Scholar
Khalidi, Muhammad Ali. (2015) ‘Three Kinds of Social Kinds’. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 90, 96–112.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Korman, Daniel Z. (2015) Objects: Nothing Out of the Ordinary. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Korman, Daniel Z. (2019) ‘The Metaphysics of Establishments’. Australasian Journal of Philosophy. http://doi.org/10.1080/00048402.2019.1622140.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Orwell, George. (2004) ‘England Your England’. In Orwell, Sonia and Angus, Ian (eds.), The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell: My Country Right or Left, 1940–1943. Vol. 2 (Boston: David R. Godine), 56–78.Google Scholar
Pettit, Philip. (1991) ‘Realism and Response-Dependence’. Mind, 100, 587–626.Google Scholar
Raz, Joseph. (1999) Practical Reason and Norms. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rosen, Gideon. (2010) ‘Metaphysical Dependence: Grounding and Reduction’. In Hale, Bob and Hoffmann, Aviv (eds.), Modality: Metaphysics, Logic, and Epistemology (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 109–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schaffer, Jonathan. (2009) ‘On What Grounds What’. In Chalmers, David J., Manley, David and Wasserman, Ryan (eds.), Metametaphysics: New Essays on the Foundations of Ontology (Oxford: Clarendon Press), 347–83.Google Scholar
Searle, John. (1995) The Construction of Social Reality. New York: The Free Press.Google Scholar
Searle, John. (2010) Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Setiya, Kieran. (2008) ‘Believing at Will’. Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 32, 36–52.Google Scholar
Smith, Barry, and Searle, John. (2003) ‘The Construction of Social Reality: An Exchange’. American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 62, 285–309.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stein, Glenn. (2015) Discovering the North-West Passage: The Four-Year Arctic Odyssey of H.M.S. Investigator and the McClure Expedition. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company.Google Scholar
Thomasson, Amie. (2003a) ‘Foundations for a Social Ontology’. ProtoSociology, 18–19, 269–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thomasson, Amie. (2003b) ‘Realism and Human Kinds’. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 67, 580–609.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thomasson, Amie. (2019) ‘The Ontology of Social Groups’. Synthese, 196, 4829–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tuomela, Raimo. (2002) The Philosophy of Social Practices: A Collective Acceptance View. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Williams, Bernard. (1973) ‘Deciding to Believe’. In Williams, Problems of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 136–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wright, Crispin. (1992) Truth and Objectivity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar