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Anti‐dualistic social ontologies, those highlighting the intrinsic interdependency of agency and structure as two sides of the same coin, are sometimes criticized for failing to provide a satisfactory account of autonomous – capable and free – agency, or even denying the reality of such agency. This paper contests these claims, arguing that anti‐dualistic ontologies only conflict with autonomous agency when the latter is understood in a highly voluntaristic sense, whose ideational roots go to what philosophers of free will call "incompatibilist" intuitions of freedom. Those intuitions suggest that actions (intentions, decisions) ultimately determined by extrinsic causes lack the kind of freedom presupposed by moral responsibility, so when agentive autonomy is presumed to involve such freedom, it does indeed cohere poorly with the anti‐dualistic picture of intrinsically structured agency. Herein, however, an alternative, "compatibilist" notion of autonomy is advanced, such that does not conflict with extrinsic determination and is therefore congruent with anti‐dualistic social ontologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rights and obligations—sometimes referred to as deontology or deontic powers—are key to most contemporary conceptions of social ontology. Both Cambridge Social Ontology and the dominant analytic conception associated, most prominently, with John Searle, place rights and obligations at the centre of their accounts. Such a common emphasis has led some to consider deontology to be a point of similarity between these different theories. This is a mistake. In this paper, I show that a distinctive conception of rights and obligations underpins Cambridge Social Ontology and its social positioning theory. Moreover, I argue that a fuller understanding of the account of rights and obligations defended in Cambridge in fact reveals that it can be differentiated from other conceptions and, most importantly, Searle's, by its recognition that a practical dimension is always involved in social constitution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to introduce the philosophical concept of vagueness and use it to critique the explanatory scope of social ontology as developed by the Cambridge Social Ontology Group (CSOG), and scholars sympathetic to it. Specifically, we will refer to one of its core theories, the theory of social positioning, to formulate our critique. This theory proposes that human beings and artefacts occupy social positions within emerging social totalities by virtue of receiving community accepted, interdependent, rights and obligations. Vagueness, here, is to be understood as a matter of indeterminacy in borderline cases that pose non‐trivial limitations to social positioning. By this we mean to say that there are instances in social ontological theorising that exclude themselves from proper inquiry due to vague terms found in natural languages. As a consequence of these vague terms, theories in social ontology formulated in such languages face limitations when striving for precisification and accuracy of theories. We further argue that these limitations cannot be overcome, but introduce four theories, namely supervaluationsim, epistemicism, truth degree theories and contextualism, which will allow interested readers to understand why these limitations are present. Finally, we consider the controversial theory of ontic vagueness and outline the implications for social ontology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I address a range of arguments put forward by Kwame Gyekye (1992) and Bernard Matolino (2014) denying Menkiti's twin propositions that persons differ ontologically from human beings and that human attitudes, behaviours and practices constitute persons in social reality. They argue that his account of "maximal" persons, rooted in African traditional thought‐worlds, conflates issues and ultimately involve him in a category mistake. I argue that their arguments do not succeed, and that Menkiti's view is not in any predicament because of them. Then, I draw on John Searle's account of social ontology to clarify the sense in which attitudes, behaviours and practices are constituents of persons. Thus, I characterise persons as social entities belonging in a social ontology. Finally, I argue that realism regarding persons is not undermined by the threat of conventionalism lurking behind the view. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is often assumed that social and political thought have nothing to do with issues of concern to metaphysicians. I have referred to this assumption in the past as The Myth of Metaphysical Neutrality. I argue here that social and political theories have metaphysical positions built into them, such that to adopt a given social or political account commits one to that theory's implicit metaphysics ‐‐ and, conversely, that commitment to a given metaphysical position will preclude adopting social or political accounts that are at odds with it. I look first at the issue of emergence, showing that key concepts employed by Aristotle, Rousseau and Marx, respectively, require a belief that wholes do not reduce to their parts. I then turn to Marx's account of alienation, arguing that it presupposes a belief in agent‐causal free will. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]