The Metametaphysics of Social Ontology

Online Conference — Toulouse University — 12, 13, 14 January 2022

https://mmso.hypotheses.org

Despite their centrality to our ordinary, scientific, and political lives, social entities remain metaphysically mysterious. How to locate these entities and their properties within the natural world ? Should they be eliminated, reduced or regarded as primitive?

Social ontology is now a rapidly growing field of investigation, attracting the attention of more and more metaphysicians with very different approaches. To build a good social ontology, some authors think it suffices to rely on the standard tools of analytical philosophy: conceptual analysis, intuition, thought experiments, formalization, grounding. Others contend that social ontology should follow the social sciences.  Still others argue that social ontology is a form of descriptive metaphysics or, alternately, that the specificity of social entities requires an “ameliorative conceptual analysis”. This increasing diversity of approaches raises a concern: if we cannot agree on how even to practice social ontology, our current efforts will be at cross-purposes.

Speakers: Asta, Esa Diaz-Leon, Michael Esfeld, Michel Grossetti, Francesco Guala, Sally Haslanger, Frank Hindriks, Harold Kincaid, Kathrin Koslicki, Raphael Kunstler, Ron Mallon, Olivier Massin, Douglas Porpora, Katherine Ritchie, Don Ross, Paul Roth, Jonathan Schaffer