Kemp refuses to distinguish philosophical dualism from the sociological analytical dualism of the M/M approach where two entities can be interdependent but are not inseperable. This makes him a Central Conflationist

What a scientific community holds to be its core beliefs change over time. Gilbert and Weatherall and Gilbert argue that a community’s core beliefs should be understood as a collective belief formed by a joint commitment and that these core group beliefs are difficult to change as it would require a new joint commitment to be formed. This chapter argues that the primary normative constraints on group belief revision are the weight of the evidence being considered by the group, and not the normative constraints that arise from joint commitments. This chapter sketches a positive view of how epistemic groups may respond to new evidence by looking to Kuhn’s own account of how crises arise and are resolved in science.

The book’s Introduction addresses the ways in which the notion of crisis functions conceptually to name not only moments of economic and cultural rupture, which become normalized within capitalist modernity, but also moments of epistemological doubt, when the taken-for-granted relationship between language and the social is called into question and subjected to critique. The Depression represented not only a breakdown of the smooth functioning of modernity and its market-based social organization, but also a parallel breakdown in a collective investment in the idea that language can represent the social, as language came to be regarded with suspicion for its role in perpetuating forms of commodification and appropriation associated with a crisis-ridden modernity. In response to this crisis, poetic language was forced to reconfigure its relationship to a society that was itself always in flux. The book’s Introduction thus establishes a basis for its survey of a broad cross-section of the poetic idioms associated with the Depression as both critiques of the idea of market modernity as a progressive, developmentalist force, and efforts to shore up language’s efficacy as a social and cultural form.

This chapter develops the crucial starting points for an inquiry into argumentation as polylogue. A framework is advanced that foregrounds polylogue as the natural state of affairs for argumentation. The framework elaborates how argument is embedded in communication and communication in activity, how argumentation is for communication, and how argumentation is a source of communicative innovation for polylogue. This profoundly social view of argumentation grounds the idea that polylogues are disagreement management practices in which various players pursue their contrasting positions across multiple places. A polylogue framework offers a new social ontology of argument in complex communication that fundamentally shifts descriptive, normative, and prescriptive attention to how contexts for argumentation are made via interaction and how argument is implicated in broader chains of social action and cognition. The polylogue framework thus scaffolds the discovery, analysis, and design of argumentative structures and functions for a much wider range of discourses, messages, interactions, technologies, and institutions.

I conclude by summarising the direct and indirect arguments offered in support of Heidegger’s claims that human mindedness and agency are intrinsically embedded within a shared world and that the shared world constitutes the most basic form of intersubjectivity.

This chapter outlines and discusses different approaches to social ontology and locates Heidegger within a range of contemporary debates. I first discuss various accounts of the scope and method of social ontology by suggesting that social ontology has a restricted scope if it takes the social world to be a distinct domain among others and that, in contrast, has an unrestricted scope if it takes sociality to be an irreducible dimension of what there is. Discussing his general conception of fundamental ontology as well as the development of his early work, I then show that Heidegger’s social ontology is non-reductive and has an unrestricted scope. I then qualify this claim by arguing that Heidegger’s social ontological method can rightly be called transcendental in the sense that he argues that the irreducible social dimension of what there is depends not on empirical social formations but on transcendental relations to others.

Chapter 5 examines Plato's account of the "fevered" polis in exploring the thesis that societies are to be understood as composed of parts well suited to carry out specific functions and that it is primarily in this respect that they resemble biological organisms. Thus, in the healthy polis each part carries out the specific function appropriate to it, and functions are coordinated such that all are well executed and society's essential needs satisfied. From Plato we learn that a defensible account of social pathology embraces a weak holism, according to which "ill" may apply to society as a whole without any part of it being ill (since it is institutions or societies that are dysfunctional, not individuals). At the same time, it eschews strong a normative holism that holds that things can be good or bad for societies without them also being good or bad for individual members.

Chapter 2 examines the extent to which theories of social pathology are committed to thinking of human societies on the model of animal organisms. It rejects the thought that societies exhibit a complete teleological harmony, where all parts work together perfectly to maintain the organism's stability and cohesiveness. Societies are totalities in the more modest sense that their parts – institutions or practices – cannot be adequately grasped or evaluated in isolation. Like organisms, societies are functional beings in that how they are constituted and how their parts interact cannot be understood without ascribing ends to both parts and the whole they make up. Societies are, moreover, functionally organized in that they carry out their characteristic functions – including both material and spiritual reproduction – via specialized and coordinated functional subsystems (or social spheres). Finally, even though social functions extend beyond material reproduction, the latter remains an essential part of healthy social functioning.

Chapter 1 begins to define the concept of social pathology and to assess its usefulness for social philosophy. It distinguishes five conceptions of social illness different from the one employed in this book, which places dysfunction, rather than suffering, at the core of social illness. It argues, further, that while social pathologies must be bad in some way for social members, those individuals are not typically ill themselves. Although there are good reasons for approaching the concept of social pathology with caution – societies differ in important ways from biological organisms, for example – judicious use of the concept can bring to light critique-worthy social phenomena to which theories focused exclusively on justice are blind. The method espoused for diagnosing social illnesses is a form of ethically informed immanent critique that bears some similarities to medical diagnosis but refrains from ascribing moral blame to the individual participants in unhealthy social practices.

Chapter 12 examines Hegel's characterization of human society as the "living good," which expresses his version of the analogy between societies and organisms. For him the analogy implies that societies both incorporate processes of life (in carrying out the activities necessary for material reproduction) and possess the same structure as biological life (that of a "self-positing" subject, which maintains itself by positing "contradictions" internal to itself and then negotiating them so as establish its own identity). Hegel also insists on the differences between life and social being: the presence in social life of self-consciousness and the capacity for freedom. Thus, societies are normatively and functionally constituted living beings that realize the good via specialized, coordinated functions, which, unlike the activities of organisms, are infused with ethical content deriving from their potential to be consciously self-determined. Analyzing Hegel's master–slave dialectic illustrates these ontological claims.

This book examines the concept of social pathology as it figures in the thought of Plato, Rousseau, Hegel, Comte, Marx, and Durkheim, demonstrating what it means to describe societies as "ill" and what the fact that we are so often drawn to conceiving of social problems as illnesses says about social ontology, or the kind of thing human society is. It explores the connections between social pathology and such phenomena as alienation, anomie, ideology, and social dysfunction and argues for the continuing relevance of the idea of "social sickness" for social critique. The aptness of the concept of social pathology in comprehending social ills points to important respects in which human societies are to be grasped as functionally-constituted, "living" beings and therefore as analogous to biological organisms, even if there are equally important respects in which the analogy does not hold, deriving primarily from the self-conscious and potentially free character of social activity. Human societies are understood as "spiritual" entities, the functions of which extend beyond material reproduction to include freedom, recognition, and self-transparency.

Chapter 6 examines Rousseau's claim that human societies are artificial and that recognizing this is crucial to understanding how theories of social pathology can ascribe non-arbitrary standards of healthy functioning to institutions. The most important sense in which society is made by us is expressed in the claim that institutions are grounded in conventions. The upshot of this claim is that a kind of self-consciousness is intrinsic to social life, namely, collective acceptance of the authority of the rules governing social institutions, which, in the most fundamental institutions, includes a shared conception of the good that explains their "point," part of which consists in promoting the freedom of social members. Because acting in accordance with such a conception is constitutive of activity in institutional life, the functions of institutions – including a conception of their healthy functioning – are accessible, if imperfectly, to the agents on whose activity those functions depend.

Chapter 3 examines some problems Marx takes to be inherent in capitalism that can be regarded as social pathologies, clarifying how dysfunction must be understood if his most sophisticated critiques are to be grasped. It focuses on forms of social pathology bound up with Marx's account of the formula for the circulation of capital, which distinguishes capital from mere money in terms of the function of each. Marx's biological language makes it plausible to interpret the dysfunctions of capitalism as pathologies: for example, its cancer-like growth that ignores the needs of producers. Yet these dysfunctions cannot be grasped without taking into account the spiritual aspects of human social being. Marx regards social life as spiritual – as informed by the aspiration to unite the ends of life with those of freedom in one's social activity – and capitalism's failure to allow for this unity as its principal defect.

Chapter 4 examines the importance of labor in Marx's diagnoses of social pathologies. Marx conceives of labor as social, productive activity that has the potential to make material reproduction a spiritual phenomenon subject to normative standards beyond those internal to biological life. Meeting those standards requires a re-appropriation of our activity that turns alienated social powers into free activity, where re-appropriation takes place along three dimensions: knowing (or understanding) it as it really is; collectively controlling or organizing it; and affirming it without illusion as appropriate to human beings' spiritual nature. In other words, unalienated social powers must be transparent, self-determined, and productive of the good of those whose powers they are. Moreover, making social powers productive of the good, and hence genuinely affirmable, requires re-organizing, and not merely re-interpreting, our activity so as to make it social in a sense that in capitalism it is not.

Chapter 7 treats two philosophers who directly influenced Durkheim: Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer. Looking at their use of the society–organism analogy, their versions of functional explanation and functional analysis, and their conceptions of what a scientific sociology must be like helps one to understand both the content of Durkheim's positions and why he held them. Three types of functional explanation employed by Comte are relevant: two forms of existential functional explanation as well as functional analysis, which makes no claims regarding the existence of what it analyzes but "explains" what it is by specifying the function it serves and showing how its features are suited to accomplishing that purpose without implying anything about how it originated or why it persists. The chapter argues that Comte and Spencer rely too heavily on the society–organism analogy, leading to an overly biologistic understanding of normative critique available to social pathologists.

Chapter 11 reconstructs Hegel's conception of objective spirit, which specifies the kind of being, or reality, characteristic of the social world and distinguishes it from other domains of reality, such as nature and subjective spirit (or mind). It begins by examining what objective spirit means for Vincent Descombes and, to a lesser extent, for Durkheim and John Searle. Four claims associated with Hegel's account of objective spirit are distinguished and defended: 1) there is a form of mindedness that exists outside the consciousness of individual social members; 2) externally existing mind, embodied in social institutions, is metaphysically prior to the minds of the individuals who live within those institutions; 3) social reality depends on a collective acceptance of its institutions' normative rules; and 4) such rules constrain what social members do but also expand their practical possibilities and hence enrich their agency