Schmitt - Socializing metaphysics: the nature of social reality

Socializing Metaphysics

Socializing Metaphysics

The Nature of Social Reality

Edited by

Frederick F. Schmitt

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Socializing metaphysics : the nature of social reality / edited by Frederick F. Schmitt.

p. cm,

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-7425-1429-4

1. Social sciencesPhilosophy. I. Schmitt, Frederick F., 1951

H61.15.S63 2003

300'.1dc21

2002154805

Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

In Memory of

Peter Winch

Contents

Frederick F. Schmitt

Margaret Gilbert

Abraham Sesshu Roth

Raimo Tuomela

Frederick F. Schmitt

Philip Pettit

John R. Searle

Edward Witherspoon

Gary Ebbs

Seumas Miller

Sally Haslanger

Ron Mallon

Kevin Kimble and Frederick F. Schmitt

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Margaret Gilbert for her help and encouragement in the course of this project. Thanks also to Ed Witherspoon and Gary Ebbs for their help. Hugh Chandler has offered inspiring conversation on these topics over the years. In recent years I have taught seminars on topics in social metaphysics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the participants in these seminars have given me more to think about than I have been able to absorb. Reza Lahroodi has helped my thinking on these topics. Jonathan Sisk of Rowman & Littlefield has long supported new studies on social issues relevant to metaphysics and epistemology, and I would like to take the opportunity to thank him for this important contribution to philosophy. Eve DeVaro deserves praise for her editorial work and not least for her patience as I missed one deadline after another. Reza Lahroodi assisted me in early stages of production, while Kevin Kimble assisted in the late stages. Kevin and I coauthored the bibliography.

I would like to acknowledge the following for permission to quote material:

Quotes from Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What?, , are reprinted by permission of the publisher: Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Copyright 1999 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

Quotes from Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (New York: Macmillan, 1958), sections 241261, are reprinted by permission of Pearson Education, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey.

Quotes from Peter Winch, The Idea of a Social Science, 2nd edition (London: Routledge, 1990), , are reprinted by permission of Routledge.

Socializing Metaphysics:
An Introduction

Frederick F. Schmitt

In the last decade, philosophy has seen a burgeoning interest in the social worldin the nature of social relations, social entities, and sociality itself. There has been much discussion in metaphysics of social norms, conventions, rules, and roles. A good deal of attention has focused on the nature of collectivitiessocial groups, associations, and corporations. Epistemologists have worried about the dependence of knowledge on social relations. And ethicists and political philosophers have explored collective responsibility and group rights. The chapters in this volume address issues in the metaphysics of sociality.

Virtually all of the discussion in the metaphysics of sociality has turned on how individual human beings figure in social relations and collectivities. The key question is whether a social relation amounts to something significantly over and above the nonsocial relations and properties of the individuals related and whether a collectivity amounts to something over and above its members standing in nonsocial relations. Individualists deny that social relations and collectivities amount to more than the associated individuals and nonsocial relations, while their opponentsholists or collectivistsaffirm the contrary. Some of the chapters in this volume contribute to the debate between individualism and holism. Underlying the debate between individualists and holists is an assumption, questioned long ago by some philosophers influenced by Ludwig Wittgensteinnotably, Peter Winch (1990)that we can understand individual human beings independently of social relations and collectivities. This assumption has been denied on the ground that individual human beings are already bound up in social relations and collectivities merely in virtue of having such attributes as thinking, acting, and speaking a language. Two chapters in the volume address the assumption that thinking, acting, or speaking a language can be understood independently of social relations and collectivities.

The debate between individualists and holists has tended to assume that our naive classification of common items as social or not is roughly on track. But social constructionists have argued that aspects of the world naively taken to be nonsocial, such as race or gender, turn out on inspection to be socially constructed. There is a question how far sociality extends into the apparently nonsocial world. There is also a question whether social constructionist accounts of these phenomena are genuinely incompatible with naturalist accounts. Two chapters in this volume discuss social constructionism.

In this introduction, I review the basic structure of important issues in the metaphysics of sociality. I begin with the question whether social relations and collectivities add something to the world over and above individuals and their nonsocial relations.

ONTOLOGICAL INDIVIDUALISM

It is nearly uncontroversial that social relations and collectivities are determined by individuals and their nonsocial properties in this sense: social relations and collectivities supervene on nonsocial properties of individuals. In particular, they globally supervene: any two possible worlds in which individuals have the same nonsocial properties (and bear the same relations) will exhibit the same social relations among individuals and the same collectivities. We cannot specify in advance of the discussion just what properties of individuals count as nonsocial, but I take it that they include no more than the following: the physical and biological properties of individuals and the singularthat is, nonjoint or noncollectiveactions and attitudes of individuals.

We reach controversy with the doctrine of ontological individualism, the view that there are only individuals, their nonsocial properties, and admissible composites of these. The opposing view is that social relations and collectivities are something over and above individuals, their nonsocial properties, and admissible composites of these. (The notion of an