Contributions to Social Ontology

Clive Lawson, John Spiro Latsis, Nuno Martins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136016066
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic Theory
• Index: Economics

Recent years have seen a dramatic re-emergence of interest in ontology. From philosophy and social sciences to artificial intelligence and computer science, ontology is gaining interdisciplinary influence as a popular tool for applied research. Contributions to Social Ontology focuses specifically on these developments within the social sciences. The contributions reveal that this revived interest in social ontology involves far more than an unquestioning acceptance or application of the concepts and methods of academic philosophers. Instead as ontology permeates so many new areas, social ontology itself is evolving in new and fascinating ways. This book engages with these new developments, pushing it forward with cutting-edge new material from leading authors in this area, from Roy Bhaskar to Margaret Archer. It also explicitly analyzes the relationship between the new ontological projects and the more traditional approaches.

This book will be of great interest to students and researchers alike across the social sciences and particularly in philosophy, economics and sociology.

1 Introduction: ontology, philosophy and the social sciences

John Latsis, Clive Lawson, Nuno Martins

Ontology, understood broadly as a concern with the nature of being, is currently enjoying a revival. Indeed, the recent rekindling of interest in ontological matters has prompted the perception of ontology as the latest buzzword or even paradigm shift.¹ Whereas this interest is evident across the disciplinary spectrum – from philosophy to artificial intelligence and computer science² – this book focuses upon the recent developments that have taken place within the social sciences. Until recently, social scientists tended to treat ontology with a great deal of suspicion. In large part, this may have arisen from the identification of ontology with metaphysics, which tends to be seen both as inaccessible to social scientists without the correct philosophical training and, in any case, as quite irrelevant to their concerns.³ In this context, it is perhaps surprising to see just how much of a comeback ontology has made in recent years. Indeed it is now common for researchers in a range of social science disciplines not only to refer explicitly to ontology but to describe their work as in some sense ontological or as part of an ontological project. It is this turn to ontology in the social sciences that forms the central focus of this book. As will become clear, however, in practice this turn has taken a variety of different forms and can be understood from quite different vantage points.

The papers collected in this book are the outcome of a conference organised in Cambridge during the summer of 2004, which was dedicated specifically to ontology. The broad theme of the conference, ‘theorising ontology’, was intended to provide an interdisciplinary forum for new research in ontology that would both give space to very different approaches to ontology as well as facilitate the further development of such projects. Over the course of the conference it became clear that there were three broad categories of contribution being made. The first and largest group of contributions was concerned with the social sciences directly and in particular with social theory. The second group of contributions engaged directly with philosophical argument, focusing upon the historical uses of the term within standard philosophy texts. A third set of contributions was more grounded in empirical research and focused upon the relationship between ontology and the application of specific theoretical or empirical models within the social sciences.

These distinctions between types of contribution serve to provide the basic structure of this book. However, these distinctions not only allow us to present a very diverse set of contributions in a relatively natural way, they also highlight significant differences in the kinds of ontological projects being pursued. Moreover, the details of these differences, we believe, prompt some important rethinking of the relationships that exist between the different kinds of ontological projects currently thought possible. In short, these broad groupings do more than organise the contributions, they raise important issues of their own. For example, the nature of ontology has often been seen to involve a particular, top down or a priori, relationship between philosophy and the social sciences. Alternatively, it is often suggested that ontology must primarily be taxonomic and so without direct implications, i.e., it must be supplemented with empirical claims to be of any use to applied social scientists. In which case, how is ontology to make a difference to social science? Before proceeding to the contributions, we first, in the remainder of this introduction, consider this relation between philosophy, social theory and empirical research in the context of a focus on ontology. Specifically, we provide some historical and philosophical context to the emergent literature on social ontology, thereby showing how it alternatively builds on, or breaks with, older traditions within philosophy. A central consideration is that modern social ontology cannot be seen simply as an application of philosophical categories or techniques to the social sciences.

Several qualificatory remarks are perhaps best made at this point. First we have no desire to impose an artificial homogeneity onto the ‘ontological turn’ within the social sciences. In fact, we hope to emphasise the diversity of ontological orientations currently in play. Secondly, we do not seek to defend one or other orientation, but rather to illustrate the distinctiveness and sophistication of approaches currently being developed within the social sciences. Ontology is more than a buzzword, it implies a range of concerns that have been neglected in the traditional disciplines and are rarely discussed in philosophical circles, as we shall see below.

Ontology in historical perspective

The term ‘ontology’ is a philosophical term of art. Coined by late scholastic writers during the seventeenth century,⁴ it entered philosophical terminology as a sub-category of the broader domain of metaphysics. The word derives from the Greek ‘onto’ (being) and ‘logos’ (study or science); so that ontology, as traditionally understood, is the science or study of being. The word ‘being’ itself has two senses in this context: firstly it refers to the entities or things that exist; secondly it refers to what it is to exist, i.e., to what (if anything) all things have in common.

Defined in this way, ontology amounts to the study of anything and everything. In practice, the following narrower ontological concerns have tended to dominate. First, ontology is only the study of anything under the aspect of its being, of what is involved in its existence. In light of this, ontology has tended to be distinguished broadly in terms of a concern with existence claims in contrast to other domains of philosophical enquiry such as epistemology (the study of knowledge), and methodology (the study of method). Secondly, ontology tends to be preoccupied with the study of those entities or things that are regarded as in some sense the most basic or significant. Although such an orientation is sometimes viewed negatively (typically as the first step towards some form of essentialism⁵), such a focus tends to involve little more than a particular limiting of scope to those features of being that might be expected, in some historical context, to be of most interest.

The first major reference to ontology came with the publication of Philosophia Primasive Ontologia by the German rationalist philosopher Christian Wolff. Wolffian ontology was an application of the deductive method to philosophical problems generated by the Aristotelian distinction between substance and accident. Beginning with indubitable first principles such as the principle of non-contradiction, rationalist metaphysicians like Wolff hoped to deduce the contents of the world without dirtying their hands in messy and inherently dubitable empirical research. Wolff’s a priori arguments concluded that the world was made up of simple, distinct, imperceptible and shapeless substances of which physical objects were complex composites. Though it persists today in some scholastic manuals, the Wolffian argument quickly lost its philosophical respectability during the eighteenth century, principally as a result of the critical contributions of Immanuel Kant. In his Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Kant demonstrated that a priori methods could be used to deduce both the thesis and the antithesis of Wolff’s argument from the same premises, thus dealing a fatal blow to the earliest modern tradition of ontology. After Kant, metaphysics survived and continued to be an integral part of philosophy, but the study of being qua being was treated with increased caution.

From the mid-seventeenth century onwards, British empiricists argued in favour of the precedence of the first-person perspective and licensed an overwhelming emphasis on human perception, resulting in a declining emphasis on ontology within Western academic philosophy. This reached its apotheosis in the first half of the twentieth century with the emergence of logical positivism and logical empiricism. Taking their cue from Hume and Berkeley, and associating metaphysics with unfalsifiable speculation, positivists and empiricists adopted a ‘flat’ ontology of sense data. This went largely unrecognised by both the authors and their critics. It was in this period that metaphysics, as noted, became a pejorative term, used to undermine unpopular philosophical positions and attack one’s opponents. As a result the ontological import of philosophical and scientific thought was rarely discussed and was left largely unarticulated.

The middle of the 20th century saw a reversal of this trend and the reintroduction of ontology into respectable academic philosophy. The main figure responsible for this renaissance was Willard Van Ormen Quine, whose collection of essays From a Logical Point of View (1953) drew attention to the crucial role of ontological commitment in the construction of both scientific and philosophical theories. Quine’s project, though intimately tied to the tradition of logical empiricism, made a decisive break with orthodoxy by affirming that speculation about the contents of the universe was not hocus-pocus but rather an integral part of successful scientific practice. At least in the early years, Quine appeared to have been concerned with traditional ontological questions and his discussions of ontology were grounded in a type of physicalism that many of his empiricist contemporaries would have shared.

Subsequently, philosophers of science such as Harré and Madden (1975), Fine (1986), Cartwright (2000), Ellis (2001) helped to reintroduce ontology into respectable philosophical discourse. These post-Quinian philosophers recognise that scientific activity presupposes particular ontological conceptions and that these are (in some sense) implied by our best scientific descriptions of the world. Thus, modern ontology within the philosophical mainstream takes its cue from the study of the natural sciences.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, therefore, modern philosophers mostly assume that natural science provides our best epistemic practice and hence assume that we should look to the natural sciences for our ontological commitments. Recent contributions often begin with the perceived success of natural science and try to elucidate (a) what it tells us about the world, and consequently (b) what the status of scientific knowledge is. Thus protracted discussions of truth, verisimilitude and rationality are common, yet mainstream philosophy rarely commits itself to a specific ontological outlook. Philosophers do not see their main job as being one of active interaction with the sciences but rather as outside observers of a specialised and privileged knowledge-generating activity.

This external, non-interactive role for ontology is not universally applied however. The philosophical approach to ontology has recently generated considerable non-philosophical research in artificial intelligence and the computer sciences, where ‘formal ontology’ is currently the central organising concept of a growing research programme. The aim is to construct formal representations of entities and relations in a given domain that can be shared across different contexts of application. At least part of the attraction is that ‘philosophy offers rigour’. However in information science, the objective is not to model reality per se but to make it possible to integrate different data systems into a single or more encompassing framework. Philosophers have been teamed up with software specialists in the hope of providing all-encompassing top-level or ‘backbone’ ‘ontologies’ that all data systems could be translated into.

Irrespective of the outcome of this particular development in the use of ontology, two observations are germane to the issues raised in this book. First, formal ontology can be directly related to the philosophical literature, and yet it involves a fundamental shift away from the descriptive work of philosophers and towards active engagement with a specific field of human knowledge (computer science). Formal ontology draws unashamedly on the philosophical literature whilst going well beyond what philosophers would normally attempt. Secondly, the desire for such a single, top-level, ontology appears to have been impossible to maintain alongside an explicitly realist orientation. Whilst the initial attraction of involving philosophers in data management and artificial intelligence lay in developing a meta-language that really would capture general features that could be universalisable in some sense, in practice such aims disappeared as prominent information systems ontologists have rather embraced a view of ontology as an inwardly directed discipline (so effectively adopting an epistemologised reading of ontology analogous to that of Carnap and Putnam – see Smith 2003). Ontology has, rather, come to be understood simply as referring to a ‘conceptual model’ (see Gruber 1995). In this latter case, ontology does not deal with or refer to reality as such, only ‘alternative possible worlds’ which are defined by the information systems themselves. Thus formal ontologies are shown to be artificial, deliberately constructed to achieve some predefined programming goal.

Formal ontology is in stark contrast to a second modern trend in ontology that is the locus of this book: social ontology. Social scientists have tended to approach ontology quite differently. On the one hand, for this group of contributions, references to traditional philosophical texts and concerns are few and far between. The genetic link between the literature on social ontology and the debates of academic philosophy is tenuous at the best of times. On the other hand, social ontologies are not deliberately constructed in the same way as formal ones. They are intimately related to the body of social scientific theory and the world it is supposed to describe and explain. At this point it is necessary to go into more detail about some general features of the social ontology projects that have emerged in recent years, and which provide the focus for much of the discussion in the contributions to this book.

Philosophy for the social sciences?

As already noted there has been a dramatic increase in interest in ontology within the social sciences in recent years and this interest has not simply amounted to an unquestioning acceptance of the concepts and methods of academic philosophers. Rather, something quite different appears to have emerged.

First, there has not been a simple or straightforward adoption of philosophical terms. Where terms have been adopted from philosophical discourse, the meanings are often quite different. For example, for social scientists the term scientific realism is intimately linked to discussions of ontology, and more specifically to discussion of the particular ontologies presupposed or implicit in the doing of science, whereas the term in philosophy conveys a more epistemological preoccupation with discussions of truth and its reliability. Secondly, social scientists have been concerned with a philosophy for social science rather than of it. There is clearly a practical interest here. Social scientists tend to be much more concerned with the nature of social being, focusing upon categories such as social structure, social institutions, rules, conventions and norms, rather than warrants for knowledge, identity conditions, etc. It is perhaps no surprise, then, that social scientists have tended to be more concerned with the work of philosophers such as Searle and Bhaskar, rather than Quine, Carnap or Putnam. The development of particular ontological conceptions has been the main attraction for social scientists, rather than epistemic problems raised by ontological explanations of the success of science.

This form of reasoning characterises the contributions in the first and largest part of this volume. In it, the authors do not examine the ontological assumptions and presuppositions of social theories in order to fit them into a pre-ordained philosophical straight-jacket. Instead, they choose to highlight the importance of fundamental (and often unarticulated) elements of social explanation and to use them for the critique and development of existing social scientific theories. These contributions are quite clearly motivated by concerns that are generated within the social sciences, problems that relate to social material as studied by practicing scientists. In contrast to philosophers’ discussion of physics (for example), theory is not necessarily assumed to be epistemically privileged: the questionable empirical credentials of most social scientific disciplines exclude this as a universally legitimate starting point.

This does not mean that the study of existing scientific theories, and their ontological presuppositions, is not an important, and often far from straightforward, exercise. However, social ontologists have not tended to take scientific theories and their ontological presuppositions for granted regardless of their empirical record. It is one thing to identify the presuppositions of scientific theories, and another to accept the plausibility of those theories and so their ontological pre-suppositions. The study of scientific theories and the identification of ontological presuppositions is part of the job of modern social ontology, but social ontologists have also sought to establish descriptive, evidential or empirical criteria for assessing those theories. Moreover, general accounts of social ontology have often been brought to bear either in establishing such criteria or in providing directionality or clarification to social theorising. In these ways, ontological insights, occasionally informed by philosophical debate, are used to enrich, develop, or criticise existing theoretical approaches. In the first section of the book, all such ontological strategies are represented in different contexts and in differing degrees. The first two contributions emphasise the advantages of developing an existing account of social ontology within a particular domain. The next four are relatively more concerned with drawing out the specific ontological assumptions and tensions of particula...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures and tables
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: ontology, philosophy and the social sciences
• PART I Ontology and social theory
• PART II Ontology and philosophy
• PART III Ontology and applied research
• Index