Ontology

More Exploration of Social Objects

Are Social Objects “Really Real”?

There is an intuitive suspicion expressed in common sense, that certain kinds of objects – namely, objects that seem to be dependent upon social factors – aren’t “really, real”. The intuition is a skeptical one arising out of a default common sense empiricism. While there may be some nominal understanding or some social agreement about the reality of things like national borders or governments, they’re not “really, real” in the sense that, say, an airplane, or a boulder, or a dog, are “really, real”. In contemporary philosophical literature, this distinction is typically understood as an opposition between the realist and antirealist understanding of objects, and is sometimes justified by adding the qualification “social” to the term object. The qualification is correct, but incomplete. This paper will attempt flesh out the notion of a social object, in order to provide a clearer understanding of what is meant by it, and to provide a means by which we might answer the question of whether so-called social objects are in fact, “really, real”.

Social Construction and Madness

Today is a great triumph. There is a king of Spain. He has been found at last. That king is me.” ~ Nikolai Gogol

What makes a “social object” “really real”? What is a “social object”, and what would it mean for anything to be “really real”, as opposed to just plain real? The common-sense (ala naive) understanding, is to suggest that things like chairs and tennis balls and bullets are “really real”, while things like “money” and “borders” and “kings” are only just “socially” real (if real at all). However, depending on the scope of the analysis, it is not so easy to draw the line implicit in the previous examples.