Volume 3, Issue 1

Social constructionist claims are surprising and interesting when they entail that presumably natural kinds are in fact socially constructed. The claims are interesting because of their theoretical and political importance. Authors like Díaz-León argue that constitutive social construction is more relevant for achieving social justice than causal social construction. This paper challenges this claim. Assuming there are socially salient groups that are discriminated against, the paper presents a dilemma: if there were no constitutively constructed social kinds, the causes of the discrimination of existing social groups would have to be addressed, and understanding causal social construction would be relevant to achieve social justice. On the other hand, not all possible constitutively socially constructed kinds are actual social kinds. If an existing social group is constitutively constructed as a social kind K , the fact that it actually exists as a K has social causes. Again, causal social construction is relevant. The paper argues that (i) for any actual social kind X , if X is constitutively socially constructed as K , then it is also causally socially constructed; and (ii) causal social construction is at least as relevant as constitutive social construction for concerns of social justice. For illustration, I draw upon two phenomena that are presumed to contribute towards the discrimination of women: (i) the poor performance effects of stereotype threat, and (ii) the silencing effects of gendered language use.

In this paper, I argue for two claims, (i) that on a common conception of the second order property of being a mental disorder, some facts about mental disorders are the result of social constructions, and (ii) that the way facts about mental disorders are constructed differs from the received view on social construction. The difference is examined, a novel type of social construction is identified, and it is suggested that there are numerous other types of social facts that are constructed in a similar way.

This article analyses the role of scientific information in legal proceedings by exploring the relationship of law, science and the factual world. The article compares legal and scientific ontology, and discusses how they relate to each other. The comparison is used to explain previous controversies between legal and scientific experts. Special consideration is devoted to the legal notion of cause-in-fact, which is discussed at length. The article distinguishes among different meanings of “facticity” in the legal discourse on causation, and discusses the bearing that these meanings have on the legal relevance of scientific information.

In this paper, I articulate a systematic model of mediated recognition based on the notion of the categorial stance. Mediated recognition is understood as a trilateral form of recognition, while the categorial stance is conceived as an epistemic position operating with the most general ontological categories and relations. The central thesis argued for is that the categorial stance can be used as a rational resource for conceptually mediated recognition. I begin with tools found in earlier research literature, then characterize the idea of conceptual rationality, consider contexts of mediated recognition, and finally, integrate the categorial stance into the model.

There has been much debate on whether and how groups of human agents can constitute social structures with causal significance. Both sides in this debate, however, implicitly privilege human individuals over non-human material objects and tend to ignore the possibility that such objects might also play a significant role in social structures. This paper argues that social entities are often composed of both human agents and non-human material objects, and that both may make essential contributions to their causal influence. In such cases the causal influence of social structures should be attributed to the emergent causal powers of what I call socio-technical entities.

Group-based reasons are reasons to play one’s part in some pattern of action that the members of some group could perform, because of the good features of the pattern. This paper discusses three broad conceptions of such reasons. According to the agency-first conception, there are no group-based reasons in cases where the relevant group is not or would not be itself an agent. According to the behaviour-first conception, what matters is that the other members of the group would play their parts in the relevant pattern, not whether they would have the cooperative intentional states constitutive of group agency in doing so. This paper argues against these conceptions and in favour of the powers-first conception, according to which what matters is that the members of the group have practically relevant powers.