Optimism for Naturalized Social Metaphysics: A Reply to Hawley

Abstract

Metaphysics has undergone two major innovations in recent decades. First, naturalistic metaphysicians have argued that our best science provides an important source of evidence for metaphysical theories. Second, social metaphysicians have begun to explore the nature of social entities such as groups, institutions, and social categories. Surprisingly, these projects have largely kept their distance from one another. Katherine Hawley has recently argued that, unlike the natural sciences, the social sciences are not sufficiently successful to provide evidence about the metaphysical nature of social entities. By contrast, I defend an optimistic view of naturalistic social metaphysics. Drawing on a case study of research into contextual effects in social epidemiology, I show that social science can provide a valuable evidence for social metaphysicians.

Back by popular demand, ontology

“…Simultaneously, the philosophical debate on ontological gerrymandering as a first-order claim about the world can be enriched through the exploration of the methodological, the epistemic and the political faces of the concept of ontology present in its anthropological definition to investigate concerns with this strategy beyond the conceptual difficulties. Arguments of this sort have been raised in other contexts outside of the ontological gerrymandering debate under the umbrella of naturalized social metaphysics (see : Porpora, 2022;Saunders, 2020). Similar intervention in the discussion under consideration could lead to investigating questions like: what are the empirical factors contributing to the maintenance of this problematic binary?…”

Ontological Anti-Foundationalism in Sociology

“…For example, anti-ontological antifoundationalism (see for example Kivinen and Piiroinen 2006) denies ontology any kind of place in the social sciences; pragmatic anti-realists give ontology a strictly pragmatic role without believing that ontological theses express anything true about the social world (see for example Lauer 2019Lauer , 2021. Others, methodological naturalists, think that truths can be said about ontology but only a posteriori, by extracting the ontological premises of our most confirmed social theories (see for example Saunders 2020).…”

Instrumentalizing and Naturalizing Social Ontology: Replies to Lohse and Little

“…Hawley (2018), for example, argues that the social sciences lack the relevant degree of empirical success to be able to use the no miracles argument, a standard tool of the scientific realist (Boyd 1980; Putnam 1975), to argue that we can believe that social scientific theories approximately describe what furnishes the social world. While there are certainly optimistic takes on naturalized social ontology (Kincaid 2016, 2018; Saunders 2020), the data so far suggest that the predictive track record of the social sciences leave the prospects for a realist and naturalist social ontology looking grim.…”