Redrawing Foucault's Social Ontology

Redrawing Foucault’s Social Ontology*

I propose that Foucault‟s works, since he wrote Discipline and Punish, rely on an implicit meta-theory that is compatible with the fundamentals of Critical Realism. To this end I examine the status of truth, methodology and social ontology used by Foucault. If this thesis is correct, then a critical realist reading of Michel Foucault would avoid some of the pitfalls that have been attributed to...

Circularity in Searle’s Social Ontology: With a Hegelian Reply

John Searle’s theory of social ontology posits that there are indispensable normative components in the linguistic apparatuses termed status functions, collective intentionality, and collective recognition, all of which, he argues, make the social world. In this paper, I argue that these building blocks of Searle’s social ontology are caught in a petitio of constitutive circularity. Mo...

Social Ontology and Social Cognition

The aim of this paper is to show that there is a reciprocal dependency relationship between social cognition and social ontology. It is argued that, on the one hand, the existence conditions of socially meaningful objects and of social groups are about sucjets’ social cognitive processes and interactive patterns and, on the other hand, social cognitive processes and interactive patterns are mod...

REDRAWING THE BOUNDARIES OF MEDICINE: The Case for Social Determinants of Health

Social Ontology as Convention

I will argue that social ontology is constituted as elaborate hierarchical and interlocking conventions of multifarious kinds. Convention, in turn, is modeled in a manner derived from that of David K. Lewis. Convention is usually held to be inadequate for models of social ontologies, with one primary reason being that there seems to be no place for normativity. I argue that two related changes ...