In this paper, I argue that conventionalised social kinds, including legal institutions like marriage, operate through collective recognition rather than functional realization (the Functionalist View). I propose a Constructivist View where legal kinds are constructed by relevant communities through collective recognition. The central concept I introduce is Social Amendment: the process by which relevant communities collectively recognize new entities as belonging to existing social kinds, thereby expanding kind membership without functional constraints. I demonstrate that social kinds exist on a continuum of conventionalisation, with properties held together by causal mechanisms (real social kinds) or fiat (conventionalised social kinds). Legal artefacts exemplify strictly conventionalised kinds where collective recognition determines the membership of the kind. Using marriage as a case study, I show how this framework resolves the tension between functional and recognition-based approaches to legal kinds. The Constructivist View bridges the artefact theory of law with social ontology, revealing their convergence through conventionalised social kinds. This approach aligns with token-first theories of kind construction and demonstrates how legal institutions evolve through collective recognition rather than functional adaptation, while showing compatibility with existing socio-ontological accounts.
Current political debates in many countries concern not just questions about the redistribution of resources but are also about the very nature of these countries, and about who belongs to them. Yet while these might seem like questions which have a social-ontological dimension to them, social ontology as a discipline has tended to focus on other types of social entities than nations or countries. This paper explores an anti-realism about such social entities coupled with a fictionalism about them (and possibly many other social entities as well), but where the reality of so-called sociomaterial assemblages is still recognized. On this approach, something like a politics of interpretation is an ever-present feature of social constructions like nations and countries. And while social fictionalism does not tell us which way to go on these political issues, it does help open them up for possible alternatives to dominant narratives.
This is a paper about the role of value in projects in social ontology. In it, I do three things: first, I argue that much like work in mainstream metaphysics, values play a central role in projects in social ontology. And much like work in mainstream metaphysics, we are not in a position to justify that role (Dasgupta 2018). Second, I argue that this illuminates much of what goes on in methodological debates between realists and deflationists in social ontology. Third, I argue that this also illuminates a source of the radical pluralism that we see in some literatures in social ontology, like the ontology of gender. These are the more specific tasks of this essay, but on a more general level, my aim is to map problems of value in social ontology on a continuum with those that affect projects in the more "mainstream" metaphysics literature. All of us have value problems, and there's as much to be learned from what we share in common as there is to be learned from what we don't.
This paper argues that Åsa Burman's concept of telic power in nonideal social ontology can be deepened by integrating Michel Foucault's account of power in both his mid-period work on governmentality and his later work on ethics. Telic power is the ability of individuals to act in relation to shared ideals. It emerges from two distinct but interrelated sources: (1) the internalization of ethical ideals through subject-formation and (2) governmentality as a structuring of conduct through rational norms and practices. To capture how ideals circulate across both registers, I introduce the notion of ethical discourse—the socially embedded circulation of exemplary ideals and role models. Ethical discourse functions both as a medium of normalization and as a resource for self-formation. Drawing on feminist critiques of gendered ideals, such as postwar femininity, and a critique of neoliberalism, I argue that Foucault's dual account of subjectivation and governmentality clarifies and expands Burman's schema of telic and structural power, offering a richer framework for nonideal social ontology.
I argue for expansionist conservationism: conserving racial classification while adding new identity-categories where justice demands. The case for expansion arises most urgently with mixed-race people, whose lived experiences are obscured by monoracial taxonomies. I show how the absence of such mixed-race identity-categories produces distinct injustices: absent-identity hermeneutical injustice and ontological oppression. To deal with this problem, I advance a novel approach to conceptual engineering that is community-first, which provides guidelines for mixed-race communities to construct their own identity-categories in a way that is genuinely emancipatory. My framework reimagines racial taxonomy in a way that centres the voices of those most affected while resisting the reification of unjust racial hierarchy.
Recent analytic feminist proposals explore the metaphysics of intersectionality through frameworks such as grounding or emergence (Bernstein 2020; Jorba and López de Sa 2024). However, these approaches, rooted in hierarchical ontology, risk yielding counterintuitive interpretations of marginalized experiences or exacerbating their marginalization. This paper has two objectives: (i) to advocate for a more reflective methodology to theorizing the metaphysics of intersectionality and, more broadly, mind-dependent structures within social ontology; and (ii) to propose an alternative framework that centers power relations while rejecting hierarchical fundamentality. Unlike existing proposals, this alternative does not treat any group's experiences or identities as more fundamental than others, and so aligns with the core principles of intersectionality.
This article brings together philosophical and anthropological perspectives to explore the empirical manifestations of ontologies and reflect on their social and practical dimensions. While some philosophical debates analyze ontologies as abstract objects disconnected from everyday ontological commitments, we build on Tim Ingold's work on an ecology of life to approach ontologies as embodied practices. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with an artisanal fishing community, namely, Siribinha, Brazil, this article focuses on Caipora, a forest being who is a significant agent in regulating human-nature relationships. The ethnography captures embodied manifestations of Caipora in Siribinha across hunting, intergenerational conversations, and religious practices, showcasing the embodied, social and practical dimensions as central to its ontology. Our analysis contributes to the debate on how ontological commitments are entangled with social practices by presenting ethnography as an effective approach for generating insights on ontologies understood in this way.
The paper explains the original establishment of property by the creationist account. Still, it shows that creationists cannot account for non-creatable things as property without collapsing into the labor-mixing account. Non-creatables, however, can be held in stewardship. The latter is a relation originally established and upheld by acts of care of something held in possession. Stewardship is conditioned and constrained by duties and it grounds stewardship rights to exclusion and control. Based on a hylomorphic account of what it means to create something so that a relation of property is established, the paper shows that an agent has ground to claim an exclusive right of control of a tangible or intangible object just in case (1) they are in a stewardship relation to the non-created parts, which they uphold by sustained acts of care or conservation, and (2) just in case they create the formal proper parts simpliciter of the whole. Property can thus supervene on stewardship, which in turn can supervene on possession. I mention some moral, positive legal, and ecological implications of this position, but they are not my focus.
There has been considerable new work on the metaphysics of sex and gender, race, sexuality, and disability. The methodology employed in this work varies considerably. In this essay I advocate for a certain conception of doing social metaphysics. This conception involves a descriptive task and a critical task; it requires that we always keep in mind what we want the theory for; and it involves meeting certain epistemic and ethical demands. I conclude by discussing some ways in which social metaphysics of this kind can support political activism and policy making, as well as research in the social sciences.
Some philosophers challenge the advisability of naturalizing social metaphysics by appeal to social science. They argue that social science fails to meet criteria for realist commitment, such as unity and novel predictive power, and that social science would therefore be a poor anchor for naturalization projects. These skeptical challenges are rooted in traditions in the philosophy of science that have held the social sciences in low esteem. Through a case study that highlights the ways in which archaeology is methodologically converging on hard science, I show that the old philosophical bias against social science is outmoded. I suggest that at least some of the methodological advances of archaeology and other social sciences are epistemologically significant and should be taken to bear on the question of realism. However, I conclude with the thought that realist commitment need not be a precondition for naturalization. The paper therefore accomplishes two main things: 1) it removes argumentative roadblocks to the use of social science in the naturalization of social metaphysics, and 2) it motivates a higher estimation of the epistemological credentials of social science as compared with more skeptical traditions.
