Knowledge in a Social World offers a philosophy for the information age. Alvin Goldman explores new frontiers by creating a thoroughgoing social epistemology, moving beyond the traditional focus on solitary knowers. Against the tides of postmodernism and social constructionism Goldman defends the integrity of truth and shows how to promote it by well-designed forms of social interaction. From science to education, from law to democracy, he shows why and how public institutions should seek knowledge-enhancing practices. (...) The result is a bold, timely, and systematic treatment of the philosophical foundations of an information society. (shrink)

The term “social world” is increasingly familiar in philosophy and political theory. Rawls uses it quite often, especially in his later works. But there has been little explicit discussion of the term and the idea of social worlds. My aim in this paper is to show that political philosophers, Rawlsian or not, should think seriously about social worlds and the roles these things play and ought to play in their work. The idea of social worlds (...) can help political philosophers think about what they do in new and fruitful ways and enrich debates about the roles, aims, and methodology of political philosophy. I begin by analyzing Rawls’s uses of “social world.” I then propose a broadly Rawlsian conception of social worlds as logically possible closed networks of social relations between agents. Next, I put this conception to work, arguing that the idea of navigating the landscape of social worlds can help us better understand the four apparently disparate roles of political philosophy that Rawls presents. Moving beyond Rawls interpretation, I use the idea of social worlds to develop an analogy and distinction between world-oriented and principle-oriented approaches to political philosophy. While principle-oriented approaches grant centrality and importance to engagement with principles of justice, legitimacy, or other political concepts, world-oriented approaches grant centrality and importance to engagement with social worlds. I propose two examples of world-oriented approaches, political philosophy as navigation and political philosophy as world-building, and argue that they are viable and worthy of further consideration. (shrink)

Making the Social World is John Searle's latest statement on social ontology. His argument is clarified and expanded, but, despite various objections, it remains largely unchanged. In this review, I want to present Searle's new book in light of these objections, explain why he has rejected the more important among them, and ask whether his reasons for doing so are defensible. I first present arguments that Searle's naturalism - his broader philosophical project - does not have a (...) definite shape in the social realm. I argue that this view is largely right because Searle allows for two seemingly inconsistent approaches: historical narratives and generalized explanations. I then introduce objections from historicists, who argue that Searle's theory is not in fact compatible with historical explanations. I explain why Searle rejects these objections, and suggest that his reasons for doing so cannot be defended against examples of conceptual incongruity. On the whole, I argue that Searle's naturalism starts from stronger assumptions than argument allows. (shrink)

Being a member of both local and global teams requires constant distribution and re-distribution of attention, engagement, and intensive communication over synchronous and asynchronous channels with remote and local partners. We explore in this paper the increasing number of social worlds such participants distribute their attention to, how this affects their level of engagement and attention, and how the workspace, collaboration technologies, and interaction modes afford and constrain the communicative events. The use of information and collaboration technologies (ICT) shapes (...) and reshapes work spaces, processes, and social interactions among team members, and team members reshape ICT and the way it is used. We use as a testbed the AEC Global Teamwork course established at Stanford in 1993 in collaboration with universities worldwide and provide examples from two sites—Stanford PBL Lab, California USA and Chalmers University, Goteborg Sweden. We used temporal analysis and qualitative methods of inquiry in order to study participants’ attention, how they used the site and the means, i.e., their social and material resources, to accomplish their interaction needs, and how they engaged throughout project reviews. (shrink)

The purpose of this book -- Intentionality -- Collective intentionality and the assignment of function -- Language as biological and social -- The general theory of institutions and institutional facts: -- Language and social reality -- Free will, rationality, and institutional facts -- Power : deontic, background, political, and other -- Human rights -- Concluding remarks : the ontological foundations of the social sciences.

Book Information Knowledge in a Social World. By Alvin I. Goldman. Clarendon Press. Oxford. 1999. Pp. xiii + 407. Paperback, £16.99.

Consider two entities x and y, and a relation R which holds among them. Is R’s existence accountable merely in terms of the non relational properties exhibited by x and y, once they interact? Or, is it more appropriate to say that R is independent of x and y, and these acquire sets of relational properties because of their being related through R? In case the former option obtains, the existence of relations is reducible to the relevant properties of the (...) related terms. As a consequence, some version of antirealism or eliminativism towards relations turns out to be true. Otherwise they are irreducible, and ontological analysis cannot be dispensed with relations treated as basic or primitive entities. The first section of my paper provides a framework for handling ontological facts about relations. I will address the assessment of the notions of internal and external relations by K. Mulligan. In the second section I will put my cards on the table. My purpose is to defend a Moorean approach to relations, i.e. both internal and external relations exist. I will briefly outline my methodology, and I will comment on the kind of evidence usually referred to in the debate. My view is that evolutionary research on groups behavior may play an important role. In the third section of the paper I will show that commonsense intuitions on relationships among human beings endorse an external reading of relations. My claim is supported by notorious examples drawn from literature. In the final section I will consider whether evolutionary research on human prosociality provides an empirical setting for the assessment of the commonsense understanding of (at least some) relations in terms of externality. I expand such setting to include behaviors of social animal in general (i.e., animals whose behaviors depends on groups’ hierarchy), and I advance a few reason why empirical research needs postulating the independent existence of relations. (shrink)

In this book Keith Graham examines the philosophical assumptions behind the ideas of group membership and loyalty. Drawing out the significance of social context, he challenges individualist views by placing collectivities such as committees, classes or nations within the moral realm. He offers an understanding of the multiplicity of sources which vie for the attention of human beings as they decide how to act, and challenges the conventional division between self-interest and altruism. He also offers a systematic account of (...) the different ways in which individuals can identify with or distance themselves from the groups to which they belong. His study will be of interest to readers in a range of disciplines including philosophy, politics, sociology, law and economics. (shrink)

The article provides an exposition of the concept of supervenience in application to the social world. It is pointed out that the issue of supervenience is particularly important in the social sciences, ranging from macro to meso to micro, individual to social. The paper considers the topics of emergence and reduction, and considers whether the concept of supervenience permits us to steer between the two. The paper closes with a discussion of the idea of relative explanatory (...) autonomy as a preferable conception of the relations across levels in the human sciences. (shrink)

This text brings together a a number of contributions that discuss issues surrounding and informing questions such as: what is the social?; in what ways can we know it?; and how can our findings be validated? Topics discussed include: the relationship of philosophical and research issues to each other; the nature of social reality; properties that may be ascribed to the social; research accounts and rhetorical persuasion; and the relations between gender and knowing. The overall concern of (...) the book is to clarify how and in what ways we can claim to know the social world and what implications and consequences this may have for social scientific practice. (shrink)

A well-defined, methodically executed, minutely documented piece of scholarship. The genre is a sociological-historical analysis of the "status" of the Florentine humanists, carried out at a rather low level of empirical generalization issuing in a theory that common sense and everyday experience would have supplied unaided. "Social position" is seen to depend on the presence of one or more frequently interdependent factors: wealth, family background, political achievements, good marriage. The careers of a vast number of representative humanists are detailed (...) as evidence. The sheer opulence of the detailed information testifies to Martines' persistent hard work and undoubtedly makes the book an important contribution to the field. It becomes evident that many of the humanists were substantial citizens, not foot-loose bohemians, and that they observed the Florentine tradition of responsible citizenship to a high degree.—W. G. E. (shrink)

Social scientific study of ancient Israel, at the very least, underscores the social nexus of religious claims and theological truth and presents a challenge to the accepted way of carrying on biblical research.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 8.1 (2001) 13-15 [Access article in PDF] Anorexia:Social World and the Internal Woman Juliet Mitchell This is a nicely presented argument--as far as it goes, but is that far enough? The problems of a reconciliation between psychoanalytic and feminist-social explanations of anorexia seem to me greater than this account allows. Social pressures and intra-family dynamics and innate mental characteristics doubtless all (...) play a part and can perfectly well co-exist side-by-side--that is, anorexia (or whatever else) will be a product of all three. The question is: Do these three dimensions need to interact in such a way that each is transformed by the interaction? By using Kleinian notions of phantasy (unconscious), Sarah Richmond is able to propose a reconciliation with social theory that is reminiscent for me of John Bowlby's work in, say, vol. 3 of his trilogy, Attachment and Loss (1969-73). There is nothing wrong with this--indeed, it must be right, but I think it misses the difficulty. The difficulty can, perhaps, best be addressed if we look not at phantasy but at the symptom. If a phantasy is truly unconscious, its form will not bear a recognizable relationship to what it is about--it will need to be deduced from the "free associations" as with a dream. If it is recognizable, it is almost certainly preconscious and can be made conscious without any intervening association or interpretation--it will look like what it in fact represents.With phantasy a slippage between unconscious and preconscious is common. The unconscious phantasy latent in anorexia may be envy of the mother's fertility and, at the same time, a preconscious refusal of the secondary status accorded in Western society to motherhood (Choderow 1978)--it can be both, as Sarah Richmond says, but the unconscious envy will be distorted. An unconscious envious phantasy about the mother might attack the full "womanly" maternal body--it is more likely to do so in a disguised form. The preconscious hostile response to social pressure to become a mother will attack this body probably in an undisguised form.The "true" anorexic sees a grossly fat person where there is a grotesquely thin one. The "real" is transformed and "unrecognizable." Why is there a delusion at the center of anorexia and what are the features and meanings of this delusion? In phantasy, the line between unconscious and preconscious is often not drawn. This cannot be the case with the symptom. A symptom is always a distortion. The same is the case with a delusion--by definition a delusion has transformed "reality."A second characteristic of a symptom is its driven, compulsive quality: The anorexic cannot stop even though she may want to. Clearly, social theory doesn't touch this--but nor does invoking unconscious phantasy per se because here the "unconscious" is often, technically, preconscious; that is to say, available to consciousness without translation.I have not myself made any proper study of anorexia. The following suggestions are just [End Page 13] that--suggestions. I have studied hysteria (Mitchell 2000), and anorexia was once considered an expression of hysteria rather than a discrete illness. The relationship of unconscious symptom or preconscious phantasy in the two conditions are, I suggest, the same. In Hystories, Elaine Showalter (who also considers anorexia to be hysterical) cites a nineteenth-century case of a man with pendulum spasms and suggests that, the man being poor and inarticulate, his spasms may have indicated his hatred of his job. He was a watchmaker (1997). If so, this would be what I am calling preconscious--unconsciously, we cannot know what it means without associations. We can make a guess that shows the process, however. The sort of meaning it might have had is that the watchmaker could possibly have had forbidden grandiose desires that had been repressed but inadequately so; hence, these desires would have returned in the conflictual form of the compulsive, bizarre symptom. The symptomatic expression of his forbidden desire, I playfully suggested, might have been modeled on Voltaire's well... (shrink)

The term ‘phenomenology’ has become almost as over-used and emptied of meaning as that other word from Continental Philosophy, namely ‘existentialism’. Yet Husserl, who first put forward the phenomenological method, considered it a rigorous alternative to positivism, and in the hands of Merleau-Ponty, a disciple of Husserl in France, phenomenology became a way of gaining a disciplined and coherent perspective on the world in which we live. When this study originally published in 1977 there were only a few books (...) in English on Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. It introduced the reader and suggested how his thought might throw light on some of the assumptions and presuppositions of certain contemporary forms of Anglo-Saxon philosophy and social science. It also demonstrates how phenomenology seeks to unite philosophy and social science, rather than define them as mutually exclusive domains of knowledge. (shrink)

A careful elaboration and defence of holism in the philosophy of the social sciences, with regard both to particulars and properties. The last chapter addresses the issue of the irreducibility of holistic explanation in the social sciences.

Editorial Board: Karl P. Ameriks, Margaret Atherton, Frederick Beiser, Fabien Capeillères, Faustino Fabbianelli, Daniel Garber, Rudolf A. Makkreel, Steven Nadler, Alan Nelson, Christof Rapp, Ursula Renz, Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann, Denis Thouard, Paul Ziche, Günter Zöller The series publishes monographs and essay collections devoted to the history of philosophy as well as studies in the theory of writing the history of philosophy. A special emphasis is placed on the contextualization of philosophical historiography into the areas of the history of science, culture, and (...) the wider scope of intellectual history. (shrink)

The past 20 years have seen dramatic rises in suicide rates in the United States and other countries around the world. These trends have been identified as a public health crisis in urgent need of new solutions and have spurred significant research efforts to improve our understanding of suicide and strategies to prevent it. Unfortunately, despite making significant contributions to the founding of suicidology – through Emile Durkheim’s classic Suicide (1897/1951) – sociology’s role has been less prominent in contemporary (...) efforts to address these tragic trends, though as we will show, sociological theories offer great promise for advancing our understanding of suicide and improving the efficacy of suicide prevention. Here, we review sociological theory and empirical research on suicide. We begin where all sociologists must: with Durkheim. However, we offer a more comprehensive understanding of Durkheim’s insights into suicide than the prior reviews provided by those in other disciplines. In so doing, we reveal the nuance and richness of Durkheim’s insights that have been largely lost in modern suicidology, despite being foundational to all sociological theories of suicide – even those that have moved beyond his model. We proceed to discuss broadly acknowledged limitations to Durkheim’s theory of suicide and review how more recent theoretical efforts have not only addressed those concerns, but have done so by bringing a larger swatch of sociology’s theoretical and empirical toolkit to bare on suicide. Specifically, we review how recent sociological theories of suicide have incorporated insights from social network theories, cultural sociology, sociology of emotions, and sociological social psychology to better theorize how the external social world matters to individual psychological pain and suffering. We conclude by making explicit bridges between sociological and psychological theories of suicide; by noting important limitations in knowledge about suicide – particularly regarding the roles of organizations, inequality, and intersectionality in suicide – that sociology is well situated to help address. (shrink)

The world into which Jesus was born in Galilee was thoroughly Jewish. It was also divided along social and economic lines and by the manner in which Jews dealt with gentiles. This is evident from different ways in which Jewish identity was conceived and differing attitudes toward land and temple. Jesus' teaching reflects this social context and interacts with it.

How does the fact that we are social creatures affect the normative reasons we have for acting? This is the most general question Keith Graham addresses in this wide-ranging book. A normative reason for acting, as Graham understands it, is a consideration about agents or their circumstances, which ought to incline them in the direction of acting in a particular way.

Institutions are normative social structures that are collectively accepted. In his book Making the Social World, John R. Searle maintains that these social structures are created and maintained by Status Function Declarations. The article’s author criticizes this claim and argues, first, that Searle overestimates the role that language plays in relation to institutions and, second, that Searle’s notion of a Status Function Declaration confuses more than it enlightens. The distinction is exposed between regulative and constitutive rules (...) as being primarily a linguistic one: whereas deontic powers figure explicitly in regulative rules, they feature only implicitly in constitutive rules. Furthermore, he contends that Searle’s collective acceptance account of human rights cannot adequately account for the fact that people have these rights even when they are not recognized. Finally, It is argued that a conception of collective intentionality that involves collective commitment is needed in order to do justice to the normative dimension of institutions. (shrink)

Putative examples of true contradictions in the social world have been given by dialetheists such as Graham Priest, Richard Routley, and Val Plumwood. However, we feel that it has not been decisively argued that these examples are in fact true contradictions rather than merely apparent. In this paper we adopt a new strategy to show that there are some true contradictions in the social world, and hence that dialetheism is correct. The strategy involves showing that a (...) group of sincere dialetheists can, given an appropriately formed institution, bootstrap contradictions into existence. We discuss objections and consider the implications of this finding for debates over logic. (shrink)

I argue in this essay that practices of epistemological injustice by European scholars and researchers are neither a thing of the past nor a confine of philosophical debates driven by bad social science. Recent dimensions can be termed experimentations in science and ethics. Taking Africa as a place for scientific experimentation with hypotheses that have been classified as unethical is rife today, with the potential for far more serious and life threatening consequences. There are two phenomena that raise ethical (...) questions and concerns: they are carried out by scientists and agencies who know well both short-term and long-term effects of the materials or products; moreover, the exportation of both the knowledge and materials for these experimentations is licensed by agencies of the governments of origin. The first concerns the exportation to and dumping in Africa of obsolete technological materials with high levels of toxity and radiation. The second concerns the mass exportation to Africa of scientific experimentations with genetically modified crops and foods when these are known in the countries of origin in Europe and America to bear pathogens harmful to both humans and ecological systems. The potential harm associated with these practices is comparable with, and puts them at the same level with, weapons of mass destruction, and their use ought to be questioned at the same level of concern as the use of sarin gas or cyanide in warfare. (shrink)

Machine generated contents note: Introduction; 1. Inclusion and identity; 2. Contesting competence: the ideal of self-determination; 3. Expertise and authority in the early church; 4. Defining the circle of sophists: Philostratus and the construction of the Second Sophistic; 5. Becoming orthodox: heresiology as self-fashioning; 6. Successions and self-definition; 7. 'From such mothers and fathers': succession narratives in early Christian discourse.

Where lies the boundary between the natural and social worlds? For the local constructionist, who wants to say that whilst global constructionism is false, nonetheless there remains a domain of soc...

This book offers a collection of contributions on medieval, early modern, and contemporary perspectives on social ontology. Since the 1990s, social ontology has emerged as a vibrant research area in contemporary analytical philosophy. Questions concerning the nature and properties of social groups, institutions, facts, and objects like money and marriage, have been thoroughly discussed. However, the historical perspective has been largely neglected. One of the central aims of this volume is to show that relevant views on (...) class='Hi'>social ontology can be found in medieval and early modern philosophy (ca. 1200-1700 C.E.), when, for example, the ontological status of money, law, and the sacraments was hotly debated. We see, furthermore, diverging positions between Aristotelian-inspired authors, who resort to a more naturalistic view of the emergence of the social realm, and authors like Olivi and Ockham, who emphasize the role of human free will and contractualist agreements. This book is the very first to address historical and contemporary social ontologies. Both historians of philosophy and philosophers will benefit from this juxtaposition, which fosters a better understanding of historical positions and approaches by using today’s conceptual and analytical tools, and allows the contemporary debate to gain new perspectives by confronting its own medieval and early modern history. (shrink)

Social categorization is an early emerging and robust component of social cognition, yet the role that social categories play in children's understanding of the social world has remained unclear. The present studies examined children's explanations of social behavior to provide a window into their intuitive theories of how social categories constrain human action. Children systematically referenced category memberships and social relationships as causal-explanatory factors for specific types of social interactions: harm among (...) members of different categories more than harm among members of the same category. In contrast, they systematically referred to agents' mental states to explain the reverse patterns of behaviors: harm among members of the same category more than harm among members of different categories. These data suggest that children view social category memberships as playing a causal-explanatory role in constraining social interactions. (shrink)

In order to delimit the realm of social phenomena, sociologists refer implicitly or explicitly to a distinction between living human beings and other entities, that is, sociologists equate the social world with the world of living humans. This consensus has been questioned by only a few authors, such as Luckmann, and some scholars of science studies. According to these approaches, it would be ethnocentric to treat as self-evident the premise that only living human beings can be (...) social actors. The methodological consequence of such critique is a radical deanthropologization of sociological research. It must be considered an open question whether or not only living human can be social actors. The paper starts with a discussion of the methodological problems posed by such an analysis of the borders of the social world, and presents the results of an empirical analysis of these borders in the fields of intensive care and neurological rehabilitation. Within these fields it must be determined whether a body is a living human body or a symbol using human body. The analysis of these elementary border phenomena challenges basic sociological concepts. The relevant contemporary sociological theories refer to a dyadic constellation as the systematic starting point of their concept of sociality. The complex relationship between at least two entities is understood as the basis of the development of a novel order that functions as a mediating structure between the involved parties. Based upon empirical data, I argue that it is necessary to change this foundational assumption. Not the dyad but the triad must be understood as the foundational constellation. This implies a new understanding of the third actor, which is distinct from the concepts developed by Simmel and Berger and Luckmann. (shrink)