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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]

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]

Abstract: John Searle's theory of social reality is among the most influential accounts in the history of philosophy. His theory also implicates concepts and issues of foundational interest to sociologists, including social structure, institutional differentiation and the relationship between linguistic performativity and institutional reality. Despite this overlap with sociological theory, and despite some sustained attention from sociologists (e.g., Lukes, ), no formal theoretical model of Searle's work exists within sociology. This paper reviews the core concepts of Searle's theory before concisely describing and then formally modelling their propositional structure. Though the overlap of Searle's approach with classical and contemporary sociological theory is discussed throughout, the paper concludes with a specific argument about his proper assimilation into sociological theory vis‐à‐vis Durkheim, Bourdieu and Giddens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

John Searle has mistakenly claimed that emergence is the central concept in the account of social ontology defended by Tony Lawson, the central figure in the project now regularly referred to as Cambridge Social Ontology. This is not the case. Rather, if any concept can be considered central for Lawson, it is organisation. In this paper, I explain how Searle could misunderstand Lawson and, in doing so, I bring out the importance of organisation for understanding how phenomena, both social and non‐social, are constituted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]