General description:
Social ontology addresses two main questions: What kind of things are social things? What kinds of social things are there? Philosophers and social scientists have addressed these questions but with limited and perfunctory interactions between the two fields (quite unlike, say, the intense and productive interactions between philosophy of mind and cognitive science).
Some social scientists—anthropologists and historians in particular—and some cognitive scientists—social and developmental psychologists in particular—have been interested in a different but closely related topic: folk social ontology. How do people identify and understand their own social life? How do they acquire the capacity to do so in their cognitive development? How do folk social ontologies vary across cultures?
There is a general idea the gist of which is quite generally accepted across the disciplines I have mentioned: what social things are and what social things there are depends on how people think of them. Social things are somewhat enigmatically described as “mind-dependent” or “socially constructed”. This has led to more discussions of the meaning of these expressions themselves than of the cognitive and social processes the existence of which they seem to imply.
To better understand the relationship between mental and social things (and not just among humans) and to do so it in a way relevant to empirical research, the basics of social ontology should be rethought. In this course/seminar we will discuss how this might be done.
- Instructor: Dan Sperber