Styles of Social Kinds
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Tris Hedges
Abstract
In this paper I initiate an important dialogue between the phenomenology of social perception and analytic social ontological discussions of how our perception of others (and concurrent conferrals of social kinds) can be sites of ‘ontic injustice’. Katharine Jenkins develops the concept of ontic injustice to theorise how your being of a social kind can consist, at least in part, of wrongful constraints and enablements. Taking Jenkins’s discussion of interpersonal kinds as the focus, I argue that the phenomenological concept of style enables a more experientially accurate account of how such (oftentimes unjust) interpersonal kinds come into being. My central claim is that Jenkins’s indicator/base property distinction performs a theoretical abstraction from actual embodied lived experience and that these properties are experientially subordinate to how other subjects are first and foremost given stylistically in experience, that is, as unified meaningful wholes. To support this claim, I engage with Jenkins’s example of gender presentation and show how its misalignment with base properties is better made sense of through the tripartite distinction of style, indicator properties, and base property. Introducing this phenomenological perspective enriches the experientially descriptive aspects of Jenkins’s social ontology.
Funding source: H2020 European Research Council
Award Identifier / Grant number: 832940
Acknowledgments
This article was written over the course of two research stays at Tilburg University and Erasmus University Rotterdam. I would like to thank my colleagues in both departments as well as my friend, Claudia Galgau, for all the invaluable feedback and comments I received on earlier drafts.
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Research funding: Work on this article was supported by a project funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (Grant Agreement No. 832940), as well as a DFI Visiting Fellowship for Junior Scholars from the Department of Philosophy at Tilburg University.
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