Categories We Do Not Know We Live By

Abstract

I argue that a central claim of Ásta’s conferralist framework – that it can account for all social properties of individuals – is false, by drawing attention to (opaque) class. I then discuss an implication of this objection; conferralism does not meet its own conditions of adequacy, such as providing a theory that helps to understand oppression. My diagnosis is that this objection points to a methodological problem: Ásta and other social ontologists have been fed on a “one-sided diet” of types of examples, resulting in a limited view of the paradigmatic social phenomena, thus making conferralism too narrow to fulfill its intended role.

Backwards Causation in Social Institutions

“…) recognize, an acceptance of institutional facts is the standard view in social ontology. This has become taken for granted, and the debate has largely shifted to consider the extent to which social categories/properties/kinds are mind dependent (see, inter alia, Khalidi, 2015;Ásta, 2018;Burman, 2019), whether they should be thought of as emergent (e.g., Silver, 2021), and other questions about how to fit institutional reality into a naturalistic picture. Further, it is not obvious that the specter of backwards causation is likely to dissuade many social ontologists from accepting institutional reality.…”