Against Social Kind Anti-Realism

Abstract

The view that social kinds (e.g., money, migrant, marriage) are mind-dependent is a prominent one in the social ontology literature. However, in addition to the claim that social kinds are mind-dependent, it is often asserted that social kinds are not real because they are mind-dependent. Call this view social kind anti-realism. To defend their view, social kind anti-realists must accomplish two tasks. First, they must identify a dependence relation that obtains between social kinds and our mental states. Call this the Dependence Task. Second, they must show that social kinds are not real because they are mind-dependent. Call this the Anti-Realist Task. In this paper, I consider several different ways of defining the relation that is supposed to obtain between social kinds and our mental states. With respect to each relation, I argue that either it fails to accomplish the Dependence Task, or it fails to accomplish the Anti-Realist Task. As such, anyone who wishes to defend social kind anti-realism must provide an alternative explanation of how social kinds depend on our mental states in a way that impugns their reality. In the absence of such an explanation, there is no reason to endorse social kind anti-realism.

Social Inconsistency

“…Although this line of reasoning is a familiar bit of philosophical folklore in social ontology, it is nevertheless not easy to find authors onto whom this inference can be firmly pinned. Mason (2020) cites Hayek (1943), Searle (2007) and Thomasson (2003b), but of those only Thomasson is an unambiguous example (and her anti-realist conclusions do not extend to the whole of social reality). But see also Khalidi (2016) for some examples of the inference from mind-dependence to anti-realism in general metaphysics.…”

“…A line of thought one sometimes encounters is that social facts are mind-dependent, and therefore not real. 23 As we've seen in §1.1 above, it is debatable whether we should regard social facts in general as mind-dependent, and as various authors have pointed out in recent years (Khalidi 2016;Mason 2020), the inference from mind-dependence to anti-realism is a questionable one. I will say this: if there is a sense of the term 'real' in which one can reasonably conclude that something is not real from the fact that it is mind-dependent, it will be a rather attenuated sense which will not placate those worrying about social inconsistency.…”