Why Critical Social Ontologists Shouldn’t Be Univocalists

Abstract

C social ontology is a burgeoning enterprise in the philosophy of social science that amounts to something like a synthesis of two seemingly disparate traditions of inquiry: namely, “critical theory,” broadly construed, and “ontology” or “metaphysics.” Like critical theorists, critical social ontologists understand their theoretical work to be formally conditioned by the fundamental project of human emancipation and social transformation.1 And, like metaphysicians, critical social ontologists concern themselves with questions about the being of the things they investigate.2 Following Michael J. Thompson, we might stipulatively define critical social ontology as a theoretical enterprise founded upon the conviction that “normative claims [e.g., claims about social injustice, oppression, etc.] are critical only to the extent that they carry descriptive claims about the essential structures of sociality within them” (2017: 18). In other words, the basic idea is that we need to attend to the distinctive being, essences and powers of social phenomena if we are to account adequately for their effects, especially those bearing on matters of social justice. Simply put, as Emmanuel Renault has noted, “different ontological assumptions can lead to distinct conceptions of social transformation” (2016: 29). This being the case, I take it as obvious that, among other things, critical social ontologists should affirm what Katherine Ritchie (2015) calls “group realism,”