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The effort to categorize nature dates at least to Aristotle and is still ongoing. The study of categories is termed "ontology"-a field Whose use in the philosophy' of social science has most recently been revived. Last April 1998, the State University of New York at Buffalo hosted a conference on "Applied Ontology: A Marvin Farber Conference in Law and Institutions in Society." The following papers were selected from the group of papers presented at the conference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic reality is constituted by economic objects such as goods, commodities, money, value, price, and exchange which together give rise to the complex entity known as the market. Each of these categories 15 governed by exact laws that provide the conditions for settling objectively whether individuals' views about an instance of any category indeed correspond to that category. This paper describes these laws as an ontological application of Carl Menger's 1871 contribution. This paper employs Carl Menger's framework from his 1871 contribution as the basis for advancing such conditions for each category of economic objects. The aim of this paper is to lay the groundwork for an ontological description of economic reality. This paper, then, can be conceived as a project in social ontology of the sort defended by John Scant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a part of an attempt to develop an economic philosophy of ontology based on the Continental tradition of hermeneutics. Ontology explores the meanings of entities as the objects of knowledge to posit the orientation of knowledge. Heidegger developed hermeneutical ontology, focusing on the self-understanding of Dasein (human beings), which consists of the “projection” of its possibilities into the future and the “thrownness” of it into the restrictions by the past history. Dealing explicitly with the pre-structure of knowledge, hermeneutics opens the perspective of knowledge much broader than permitted by the analytical tradition of philosophy. It is the contention of this paper that Schumpeter from the Austrian subjectivist circle could cope with this approach in social science by the use of the concepts of “innovation and tradition” or “creation and routine.” The paper discusses the relationship between Heidegger and Schumpeter on various philosophical issues and derives what might be called the Heidegger = Schumpeter theses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One aim of this paper is to make visible the connection between Searle's views on social reality and his general ontology, and at the same time to show that some peculiar features of his analysis of social reality are a natural outcome of his general ontology. The paper contains five sections. In the first Searle's naturalism is philosophically situated and its differentia specifica explained. Then, Searle's view that intentional states exist only in brains is presented. One might say that, according to Searle, each mind is, although caused by a material brain, a Leibnizian monad. This view is related to an important, but neglected, distinction that Searle himself has made between requirement conditions of satisfaction and required conditions of satisfaction. In the third section, it is pointed out that, necessarily, sometimes there has to exist some kind of relation of satisfaction between the two kinds of conditions of satisfaction. Searle, however, has never really discussed what this satisfaction relation may look like. The upshot of all the remarks is that, fourth, Searle's general ontology automatically implies an ontology of social reality according to which a social fact can only exist as a scattered aggregate whose items exist in the brains of the people who constitute it. Finally and fifth, I try to think with Searle against Searle. His monadological view of social reality cannot, Searle notwithstanding, he regarded as being close to the direct realism of common sense. Searle's realism is an indirect realism. However, if Searle's view that intentional states exist only in brains is rejected, then the rest of his ontology has features that may take us closer to a direct realism. Such a move, which in one respect takes us closer to common sense, takes us in another respect away from common sense. The title of the last section is "Social Reality and the Impossibility of Common Sense." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the ontological structure of institutional and other social entities in virtual environments. The emphasis is on institutional reality, which consists of entities (objects, events, etc.) like money, contracts, and chess pieces, which are constituted in part through collective agreements. It is studied how institutional entities are constructed in virtual environments, how they relate to institutional entities in the real world, and how they are recognized by users. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Any study in ontology is faced with the difficulty that, if the investigation is to be successful, the ontological status of the subject under investigation must he determined prior to selecting the method of analysis. This paper argues that Reinach's methodology, which depends upon in- sights into intelligible structures or essences, cannot be successfully applied to an investigation of television, because television lacks the essential unity necessary for even the possibility of such an insight. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many world views and complicated laws within a society have evolved from simpler forms. In general, this process works well. However, on occasion the original basis, no matter how well it worked at inception, does not work well in later, more complex, or different societies. One such case is that of the current law of intellectual property, which does not seem to adapt well to the introduction of new technologies. This paper explores this problem and its causes, and then proposes some possible changes that might, with minimal disruption, minimize many of these difficulties in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rigorous tools which are well known to philosophers can be put to use in the analyses of many concepts pertaining to social reality. This paper attempts to apply the distinction between brute and institutional facts advanced by John Searle to the analysis of property rights over land. It might be commonplace to suggest that all rights are entities whose existence is an institutional fact, i.e., it is the result of human conventions. In the case of property rights, it is not merely at this level that institutional reality confronts us. The object over which the property right falls, a land parcel, is itself an entity whose existence is an institutional fact. This doubly institutional character of property rights makes it easier to see that property rights over land have many important differences with other sorts of property rights. Of course, some of these differences have been pointed out before, say, by appealing to the seminal distinction between movables and immovables, hut never with the rigor or the justification that I attempt here. As a result of taking seriously the nature of the object over which the right falls, we can see that property rights over land have more in common with other sorts of relationships, such as political conceptions of sovereignty, than with other forms of property rights. Real estate is just one of a myriad of social objects that we encounter every day. The ontology developed here is but one example of how philosophical analysis of everyday objects enriches our understanding of the social world, and offers us tools for clearer, practical treatment of these objects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whately is a difficult thinker, partly because he is competent in so many disciplines. Joseph Schumpeter, who struggled with Whatley's “elusive” greatness, saw a systematic core in Whately: the force behind Nassau Senior's axiomatics. Whately's contemporaries did not talk of axiomatics, but they did point out that his work depended upon an unusually small number of authorities, that is, Aristotle, Bacon, and Smith. In our interpretation, these foundational sources gave Whately three guiding principles to characterize all human activity: innate sociability, innate self-love, and costly mental activity. Self-love includes a desire to know and a desire to share knowledge. These principles, coupled with a normative principle of fairness, constitute the basis for his science of reciprocal exchange, or catallactics. Violations of fairness motivate his multidimensional reform proposals. For Whately, fairness requires transparency, and the demands of transparency for tractions is literally Gospel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ontology of marketing, particularly the question of what products and brands are, is still largely unexplored. The ontological status of brands hinges on their relationship with products. Idealists about brands see perceptual or cognitive acts of consumers grouped under the heading brand awareness' or `brand image' as constitutive for the existence of brands so that, in their view, tools of the marketing mix can influence relevant mental dispositions and attitudes. Brand realists, on the other hand, reject the view of brands as mere marks or names and interpret them as emergent products with properties that afford branding in the sense of Gibson's ecological psychology. Brand strength is a function of the degree to which brands occupy defensible niches in product space. Branding as a process involves changing external or internal boundaries of products. Several arguments are proposed in favor of brand realism. The fragments of an ontology of marketing are developed in a broadly Aristotelian frame- work. Brand realism has significant implications for a new understanding of issues ranging from the effects of advertising to financial brand valuation, the nature of trademarks, and marketing strategy in general. It permits one to treat brand equity as a real phenomenon not dependent on associations, attitudinal states such as brand loyalty, or spurious constructs such as brand character or personality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with the ontological and modal status of the things we watch on television. I apply Adolf Reinach's distinction between what he calls `simple objects" and states of affairs" to the wider problem of distinguishing between "seeing as perception" and "seeing as comprehension." These considerations lead me to conclude that those who produce and edit together a television story commit to a communicative act and there is no escape from this fact about television viewing. Television provides US with objects that have been actively created by other people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]