Shadowing Practice: Episode 1: "What is social ontology?" - Prof Brian Epstein - Learn English Speaking with 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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About This Lesson
In this lesson, you will engage with the concept of social ontology as presented by Professor Brian Epstein. You will practice your English listening and speaking skills by exploring philosophical questions related to society, such as the nature of money, gender, social groups, and art. As you listen, you will have the opportunity to reflect on these thought-provoking ideas while improving your language abilities. By focusing on the delivery and expression of complex concepts, you will enhance your comprehension and communication skills in English.
Key Vocabulary & Phrases
- Ontology - the branch of metaphysics dealing with the nature of being.
- Cryptocurrency - digital or virtual currency that uses cryptography for security.
- Agency - the capacity of individuals or groups to act independently and make their own choices.
- Sociologically constructed - the idea that societal phenomena arise from social interactions rather than nature.
- Work of art - a creation that is appreciated for its beauty or emotional power.
- Social group - a collection of individuals who interact with one another and share common characteristics.
- Ownership - the act or state of possessing something.
- Intentions - plans or goals that guide actions.
Practice Tips
To effectively practice your speaking skills while watching this video, consider employing the shadowspeak technique to enhance your learning experience. Start by playing a segment of the video at a comfortable speed. Pause after each sentence and try to repeat what the professor has said, mimicking his intonation and rhythm. Due to the academic nature of the content, it may take some time to get used to the terminology and cadence.
For beginners, you might consider watching the video first with subtitles enabled, which will help with comprehension. As you gain confidence, gradually reduce your reliance on the subtitles and only listen. This method allows you to relate words to their meanings in context, reinforcing your understanding of key terms like cryptocurrency and work of art.
Additionally, try to summarize the key points discussed in the video in your own words after listening. This practice not only helps with vocabulary retention but also allows you to express complex ideas, similar to how Professor Epstein does. Remember, the more you engage in shadow speech, the better your pronunciation and fluency will become, making it an essential part of your learn English with YouTube journey.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.