Pratica di Shadowing: Episode 1: "What is social ontology?" - Prof Brian Epstein - Impara a parlare inglese con i video
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Music Social
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ontology, in my opinion, is one of the most exciting fields in philosophy today.
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Twenty years ago, when I started in the field, almost no one had even heard of it.
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Now, social ontology is at the center of problems not just in philosophy, but in lots of places where philosophy intersects with other disciplines.
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So what is social ontology?
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A good way to make sense of the field is with some questions that people ask and work on in social ontology.
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One question is this.
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Everybody these days seems to be talking about Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
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They're debating, among other things, whether they're just a fad or whether they're the future of money.
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But what is money in the first place?
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Is Bitcoin already money?
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Can it be?
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A very different question is this.
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What is the nature of sex?
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What is the nature of gender? gender?
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Is there a gender binary or is that a mistake?
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Is gender biological or is it socially constructed or is it an illusion?
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Here's another question.
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What are social groups?
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And can social groups do things in the world?
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Does it make sense to speak of a social group taking action or having a thought or intending to do something?
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Can groups have beliefs?
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Can they have feelings or emotions?
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What is a corporation?
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Some people have argued that corporations are just sets of legal contracts.
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Is that right?
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Can corporations be reduced to their employees or to their shareholders or to their stakeholders?
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And what about corporate agency?
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Can corporations take actions or have intentions? Can they have beliefs?
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Can corporations have emotions?
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Can Microsoft cry?
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Can they feel proud or guilty?
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Another question, what is a work of art?
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Is there a definition of a work of art?
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Are there any limits to a work of art or can anything be a work of art?
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What is a piece of music?
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What's the relation between a piece of music and its performances?
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What is property?
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What is ownership?
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And what are the sources of the institution of ownership?
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Is ownership a product of natural rights or of social convention or of something else?
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What does it take for someone to own something and why?
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That's a lot of questions, but lots of them have a similar form to one another.
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Lots of them are asking what is X or what are X's where the X is some social thing?
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Money, Bitcoin, gender, race, social groups,
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law, artworks, etc. Or else they're asking about important properties of these things like whether groups can think
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or be responsible for their actions and why.
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Now, these questions are not new to philosophy.
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Some of the earliest debates in philosophy,
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even predating Socrates, involve people asking what features of the world are products of nature and what features are products of society.
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Is morality natural or is morality a social construct?
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This is not a new question.
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But for most of the 20th century, these questions didn't really have a home, or at least not one home.
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The nature of money was discussed by philosophers of economics, the nature of mind by philosophers of mind, the nature of law by legal theorists.
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And some of these questions like what is race or what is gender, those were essentially ignored, at least in mainstream philosophy.
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Social ontology is a field built on the idea that these questions are interesting and maybe they're related to one another.
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Maybe we can learn something about the nature of race by investigating the nature of gender or vice versa.
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Maybe we can learn about the nature of money by investigating the nature of law
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or by investigating nature of tools and artifacts we invent.
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Maybe there are general ways social construction works.
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Maybe all these things are constructions of the mind, or maybe they're all constructions of language,
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or maybe they're constructions of our social practices, or maybe they're products of the built environments we live in, or of biology and evolution.
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Social ontology investigates these social things one by one, and it investigates them systematically,
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trying to figure out just how the social world is built and structured.
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I mentioned that some of the problems in social ontology are as old as philosophy itself.
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Historically, lots of people have worked in the broad area we now call social ontology.
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To mention just a few, in early modern philosophy, Thomas Hobbes writes on the nature of the state.
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John Locke writes on the nature of property, Pufendorf on law, David Hume on all kinds of things,
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including money, government, and promises, and there's work in the Kantian tradition, there's work in the phenomenological tradition, and more.
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I do want to mention though why I still think it's fair to say that in contemporary philosophy, social ontology really is a new field,
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just emerging in the last 20 years or so.
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In contemporary philosophy, questions like what is X are dealt with in the field of metaphysics.
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Metaphysics is the study of the nature of things, as opposed to epistemology, which studies what we know, or value theory, which studies what we ought to do and why.
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But it's really interesting to take a look at a metaphysics textbook or anthology, even a very recent one,
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to see how they limit the breadth of the questions they ask.
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So let me get a book to show you.
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Here is the metaphysics anthology that I'm using this very semester in my class in metaphysics.
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It's a good anthology.
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And here are some of the sections of the book.
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There's one section on what is existence, there's one section on what is time,
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what is space, there's one on how causes bring about their effects, what are persons, what is free will,
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and are there many possible worlds.
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Now, these are all very interesting and general topics.
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But it's also interesting that there is nothing about the social world.
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There's space, time, causation, stuff in physics, and there are persons and free will, that stuff about individual people, but there's nothing social.
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In social ontology, we want to learn the lessons from classic metaphysics, but also say that most of the world is social
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or socially constructed or the product of people and history and that sort of thing.
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And we need to build up a toolkit for making sense of all that, tools we might not find if we just look at this kind of metaphysics.
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So what precipitated this change, and how did social ontology come together as a field?
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In my view, four crucial things happened in the last few decades of the 20th century.
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The first is actually metaphysics.
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The people started to do metaphysics again.
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For a long time, philosophers thought all you could do in philosophy was talk about language, or you could talk about how we acquire knowledge.
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But due to people like David Lewis and Saul Kripke, it became okay to do serious work into the natures of things or the essences of things in the world.
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A second very important move was that a lot of topics in philosophy that had been very individualistic became socialized.
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People started to recognize that language and thought weren't just things going on inside the heads of individual people, but were social through and through.
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This happened in the philosophy of language, but also in the philosophy of mind and in epistemology and it was spearheaded by people like Hilary Putnam,
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Tyler Burge, and Ruth Milliken.
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The third important thing I think
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that happened in the last part of the 20th century was
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that a group of thinkers became interested in groups and in group agency and in groups having intentions.
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This was led by people like Margaret Gilbert, Michael Bratman, Raimo Tuomola, and John Searle.
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And then the fourth important thing was that there was a change in the philosophy of science.
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For most of the 20th century, physics was seen as the pinnacle of science, and it was the focus of most interest in the philosophy of science.
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And that too changed in the late 20th century, especially in the philosophy of biology, but that also led to a resurgence in the philosophy of social science,
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which had kind of gone dormant.
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And then around 20 years ago, another generation of people came around.
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And this is the generation that I personally would put myself into.
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And from our perspective, all those things I've talked about so far are at least arguably part of the same project.
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We were comfortable with sociality.
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We fully internalized the idea that language, concepts, and knowledge all depend on our social interactions.
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We learned about the analysis of things like convention and shared intention
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and group commitment from people like David Lewis and Margaret Gilbert.
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And so we had some tools and theories to build on.
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We were okay with doing metaphysics without having a little voice in our head always telling us
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that metaphysics is impossible so you can't do it.
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But we also did see metaphysicians leaving out lots of topics
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the way philosophy of science had been leaving out things like biology and social science.
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So all these things came together to give birth to a
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where people were thinking of the nature of the social world in a unified way.
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Now, at first this work was pretty remote to what most people were doing in philosophy, but just in the last few years,
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it's become increasingly central to how people are thinking across the whole discipline.
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What do people do then in social ontology?
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Well, social ontology is a field.
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It's not a theory and it's not a project or a school of thought.
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There are tons of disagreement among people in the field.
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People working in social ontology don't even agree that all the social things I've been talking about even exist or make sense.
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Some people work on group beliefs, while other people deny that groups can have beliefs.
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Some people are okay with group beliefs, but deny that groups can have emotions.
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Some people deny that there even are social groups.
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Those people should probably get out more.
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Or some people deny that a group is different from the collection of people who compose it.
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Similarly with race or with gender.
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Some people argue that races are biological categories.
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Many people argue that races are socially constructed but nevertheless are real.
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And some people argue that race is an illusion.
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There's no such thing.
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All of these theories fall into social ontology.
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The argument that one or more or all social phenomena are fictions, that's a theory of the nature of the social.
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Most of the work in the field can be broken down into two kinds of projects, with a lot of theorists doing some of each.
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First is specific investigations into some particular sort of social entity.
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People will write on the nature of money, or they'll write on the nature of gender or of social groups, all the different kinds of things I've been talking about.
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The other major category of project is people working on general theories of how the social world is built.
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Some of this work involves clearing up specific concepts that apply broadly, like what is a social fact or what is a social kind.
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And some of this work involves developing general theories of how the social world is built or constructed.
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Some examples of of these general theories are John Searle's theory of collective acceptance, or Asta's theory of conferralism,
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or Sally Haslanger's and Ron Mallon's respective work on social construction, or my theory of grounding and anchoring.
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These projects try to cut across a range of particular social kinds and entities.
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Maybe they try to explain everything under one umbrella, or maybe they try to account for different ways that varieties of social kinds can get constructed.
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And then on top of these projects, there are lots of interdisciplinary connections.
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There's a lot of work in sociology, for instance, on things like groups, institutions, and social structures.
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There's a lot of work in economics on the nature of markets, firms, industries, money, debt.
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There's work in political science on states and interest groups and group reasoning.
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There's work in public health on the nature of disease, health, disability.
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work in law, on property, corporate persons, and so on.
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Social ontology, when it's at its best, learns from all of these fields, and hopefully when it's at its best, it gives back to those fields in turn.
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With social ontology, the hope is to understand the social world, both in all its particulars and in the general ways it's built.
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And if we can understand it better, maybe we can make it better.
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you
Contesto & Sfondo
Il professor Brian Epstein si immerge in un campo affascinante della filosofia chiamato ontologia sociale. Questo ramo dell'indagine filosofica ha guadagnato attenzione nel corso degli anni e ora si intreccia con molte altre discipline. Epstein pone domande fondamentali riguardo alla natura di concetti che utilizzamo quotidianamente, come il denaro, il genere e le istituzioni sociali. Un aspetto cruciale della sua discussione è come le entità sociali possano avere intenzioni e credenze, nonché come il concetto di "arte" possa essere percepito e definito.
Top 5 Frasi per la Comunicazione Quotidiana
- Che cos'è l'ontologia sociale? - Questa domanda chiave ci fa riflettere sulle concezioni che abbiamo della società.
- Può Bitcoin essere considerato denaro? - Un esempio di come il linguaggio si evolve con la tecnologia e l'economia.
- Qual è la natura del genere? - Un discorso che incoraggia il confronto e la crescita personale attraverso la lingua.
- Che cosa definisce un'opera d'arte? - Un'affermazione che può aprire a conversazioni interessanti e personali.
- Le corporation possono avere emozioni? - Una domanda provocatoria che sfida le norme comuni e favorisce il dibattito.
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