Search results for "social ontology"
showing 10 items of 15 documents
Social Space for Self-Organising: An Exploratory Study of Timebanks in Finland and in the UK
2018
The article examines the challenges to self-organisation and upscaling of alternative economies from the viewpoint of defending and negotiating social space. Timebanks in Finland and the UK are presented as examples, analysing the difference of defending such social space in the contexts of a traditional welfare state (in the case of Finland) and an austerity-driven government with a “Big Society” ideology (in the case of UK). Both systems of government present different kinds of pressures on timebanks, pushing them to a given ontological categories and to action in accordance with pre-defined political goals. This difference, along with timebank reactions and the question of prospects of o…
Exploring the concept of causal power in a critical realist tradition
2007
This article analyses and evaluates the uses of the concept of causal power in the critical realist tradition, which is based on Roy Bhaskar's philosophy of science. The concept of causal power that appears in the early works of Rom Harre and his associates is compared to Bhaskar's account of this concept and its uses in the critical realist social ontology. It is argued that the concept of emergence should be incorporated to any adequate notion of causal power. The concept of emergence used in Bhaskar and other critical realists' works is shown to be ambiguous. It is also pointed out that the concept of causal power should be analysed in an anti-essentialist way. Ontological and methodolog…
Normativity and collective recognition in Searle's account of language and social ontology
2015
Prendendo le mosse dalla tesi di John Searle che le istituzioni sono create e mantenute grazie al riconoscimento collettivo di funzioni di status secondo la forma logica “X conta come Y in C”, analizzO il ruolo cruciale delle regole costitutive nel percorso teorico searleano da Speech Acts a Making the Social World. Rendendo esplicito il parallelismo tra le regole costitutive che sottendono la realtà istituzionale e quelleche governano gli atti linguistici, miro a derivare da esse i criteri normativi per la valutazione razionale sia degli atti linguistici sia degli atti istituzionali. Mostro come tali criteri consentano di distinguere tra riconoscimento collettivo razionalmente motivato e r…
The Problem of the First Belief: Group Agents and Responsibility
2020
Abstract Attributing moral responsibility to an agent requires that the agent is a capable member of a moral community. Capable members of a moral community are often thought of as moral reasoners (or moral persons) and, thus, to attribute moral responsibility to collective agents would require showing that they are capable of moral reasoning. It is argued here that those theories that understand collective reasoning and collective moral agency in terms of collective decision-making and commitment – as is arguably the case with Christian List and Philip Pettit’s theory of group agency – face the so-called “problem of the first belief” that threatens to make moral reasoning impossible for gr…
Group-Directed Empathy: A Phenomenological Account
2015
This paper is an attempt to build a bridge between the fields of social cognition and social ontology. Drawing on both classical and more recent phenomenological studies, the article develops an account ofgroup-directed empathy. The first part of the article spells out the phenomenological notion of empathy and suggests certain conceptual distinctions vis-à-vis two different kinds of group. The second part of the paper applies these conceptual considerations to cases in which empathy is directed at groups and elucidates the sense in which individuals can empathically target not only other individual’s emotions, but also shared emotions as such. Clarifying the structure of group-directed emp…
Bhaskar and Bunge on Social Emergence
2009
This article discusses the theories of social emergence developed by Roy Bhaskar and Mario Bunge. Bhaskar's concept of emergent causal power is shown to be ambiguous, and some of the difficulties of his depth-relational concept of social emergence are examined. It is argued that Bunge's systemic concept of emergent property is not only different, but also clearer and more consistent than Bhaskar's concept of emergent causal power. Despite its clarity and consistency, Bunge's definition of the concept of emergent property is shown to be too broad and analytically imprecise for the purposes of an emergentist social ontology. It is argued that Bunge's systemic account of social emergence can b…
Who Is Ill When a Society Is Ill?
2021
This chapter gives an overview of four different approaches to social pathologies, which are present in contemporary critical social theory, and analyses their social-ontological commitments. The different approaches can be divided into two camps. The ‘thin sense’ of social pathology focuses on social wrongs, and the socially caused and pervasive suffering of individuals. The ‘thick sense’ of social pathology, in turn, claims that society is its own entity, or a whole, which can be ill. This chapter discloses the ontological commitments behind different conceptions of social pathology in order to highlight what difference these commitments make in relation to the critical potential of socia…
On the ontology of social pathologies
2019
The recent years have seen a rehabilitation of the concept of social pathology in the critical social theory. However, several pertinent questions about how to understand social pathologies remain. One of the big issues is, who is actually ill when a society is ill? Is it certain individuals, a large proportion of the population, groups, institutions, or the society as a whole? And what does it mean for these entities to be in a pathological state?This short presentation introduces four conceptions of social pathology that can be divided into roughly two camps. The “thin sense” of social pathology is more metaphorical and focuses on the socially caused and pervasive suffering of individuals…
Grounding social criticism : from understanding to suffering and back
2019
This paper critically examines John Dewey’s and Axel Honneth’s critical social philosophies in order to highlight two different normative sources of social struggle: scientific understanding and social suffering. The paper discusses the relations of these sources with each other and aims to show to what extent the normative sources of Dewey’s and Honneth’s critical social theories are compatible. A further aim is to use the comparison between Dewey and Honneth in order to argue for a desiderata for critical social ontology. The argument is that we want to consistently include both elements – suffering and understanding – in critical social theory as only by having both will critical theory …
The Structure of Group Identification
2017
The concept of group identification has been widely discussed in the fields of social psychology and social ontology. The debate has been somewhat unbalanced, however. The structure, nature, and experiential status of groups have been assessed widely and from several perspectives. Instead, the concept of identification as received considerably less attention. This is why the ongoing debate threatens to be misled by various conceptual ambiguities. These ambiguities concern first and foremost the target, structure, and temporal nature of identification. The present article offers a philosophical analysis of the concept and clarifies the conceptual ambiguities haunting the debate. peerReviewed