Three sources of social indeterminacy

Philosophical Studies https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-023-02079-2 Three sources of social indeterminacy Johan Brännmark1 Accepted: 4 November 2023 © The Author(s) 2023 Abstract Social ontologists commonly think that our ideas about social entities, and about other people also inhabiting the social realm, play an important role in making those entities into what they are. At the same time, we know that our ideas are often indeterminate in character, which presumably would mean that this indeterminacy should carry over to the social realm. And yet social indeterminacy is a neglected topic in social ontology. It is argued that this neglect can be traced to how a particular approach that favors ahistorical reconstructions in making sense of social entities has come to dominate social ontology. If we think beyond the parameters set by this approach, however, we can see that recognizing indeterminacy as a pervasive phenomenon in the social realm might open up new interpretative possibilities in relation to different social categories. This argument is at least partly in line with recent calls for a move towards nonideal social ontology. Keywords Social ontology · Nonideal theory · Indeterminacy · Vagueness Ask an ordinary person what, say, an institution is and you are likely to get a fairly inarticulate answer, maybe a couple of examples of things that are institutions. Ask a social ontologist, and you are likely to get a considerably more articulate answer (although different ones depending on who you ask). Or take more concrete social phenomena, like money and baseball (favorite examples among some social ontologists) or race and gender (favorite examples among other social ontologists). Here the ordinary person might have more to say, but it would probably still be quite disorganized, while some social ontologists could give you sophisticated accounts of the nature and existence conditions of those phenomena. Johan Brännmark 1 Department of Philosophy, Stockholm University, Universitetsvägen 10D, Stockholm 106 91, Sweden 13 J. Brännmark At first sight, this is hardly surprising, and not necessarily problematic. It is difficult to see what social ontology should be about, if not to sharpen the contours of the social realm: organizing and systematizing our understanding of social phenomena. That there might be a discrepancy between how laypeople understand certain phenomena and how those same phenomena are explicated in developed ontological or scientific accounts is not automatically worrisome. Yet the social case might stand out as an exception here. After all, a very common idea in social ontology is that our ideas play a constitutive or causal role in making entities in the social realm come into existence.1 If laypeople have indeterminate and disorganized ideas about various social phenomena, then these will accordingly go into the processes that either constitute those phenomena or cause them to come into existence, and presumably the results would then often be relatively messy rather than neat and precise. In what follows here, the notion of social indeterminacy will be used to refer to the various ways in which social phenomena might be vague, fuzzy, unsettled, and unclear. The case that will be made in this paper is that we have reason to think that social indeterminacy is pervasive. There are then further questions to be raised about the more exact nature of this indeterminacy. In the general debate about vagueness and indeterminacy, a common view is that all cases of vagueness or indeterminacy are really semantic or perhaps epistemic in character, never ontic or metaphysical. For many, this is even ‘the only intelligible account’ (Lewis, 1986: 212). But if the ways in which we understand or interpret objects in the social world will not just be about how we decide to represent a pre-existing world, but instead play a constitutive or causal role in making entities in that realm come into existence, matters become more complicated. The relevant kind of social indeterminacy might perhaps still be acceptable even to skeptics about metaphysical indeterminacy, since the ultimate source of indeterminacy is not worldly.2 But exactly what to say on such matters is something that will be set aside for now. The simple argument provided above for why we should expect social indeterminacy to be pervasive is really very simple, while the sources of indeterminacy that eventually will be identified here will be much more specific. But the simple argument does still raise something of a puzzle: why is the phenomenon of social indeterminacy hardly discussed at all in the social ontology literature?3 The working hypothesis for this paper is that this is due to presuppositions about how theorizing 1 Often the emphasis is on the constitutive role played by our attitudes, but there are also authors, like Thomasson (2003) and Khalidi (2015), who argue for there being social entities that do not exist simply because we believe them to exist. And Guala (2016) strongly emphasizes patterns of behavior rather than the content of our beliefs in making institutions come to exist. But even on such accounts, the ways in which people understand things in the social realm will presumably guide their social behavior. 2 Take Hawley (2001: 104): ‘When I say that the indeterminacy of some utterance is ontic I will mean that the indeterminacy is not a consequence of semantic indecision in the component terms of the utterance.’ On this understanding, social indeterminacy might come out as non-ontic by being a consequence of semantic indecision. However, see Barnes (2010: 623n25) for a worry about this kind of view being too restrictive. 3 Richardson (2023) is an exception, as is Rust (2021). Otherwise, there has also been some discussion of another possible consequence of the social realm being a messy place, namely that it might involve contradictions, e.g., Bolton and Cull (2019) and Brouwer (2022). It is certainly possible that the social realm involves both contradictions and indeterminacies, but if we think that the latter are pervasive, this 13 Three sources of social indeterminacy in social ontology is to be done, where certain complicating factors tend to be put to the side in order to facilitate a specific kind of theorizing. It then becomes important to critically discuss those presuppositions, not just because there is a question about whether we need to change how we do social ontology in order to account for social indeterminacy, but also because by identifying features that might contribute to making it less visible, we might get a path to making it more visible. This paper has two main sections. The first one attempts a diagnosis of how certain tendencies in analytic social ontology might have contributed to obscuring the phenomenon of social indeterminacy. It will by necessity be a broad-brush picture, but hopefully it can still help in trying to explicate differen (...truncated)