Some Problems with Social Ontology

Simply put, social ontology is the study of what sort of entities exist in what we
call the social world. In other words, social ontology is the study of social
entities. It is one of the most neglected areas of the philosophy of social science,
and indeed, of analytic philosophy generally. Unlike its naturalistic counterpart,
social ontology faces a great deal of obstacles right from the get-go. The issues
range from very simple points of clarification to very complex issues about the
very possibility of a social ontology.

The first obvious point of interest is the very idea of a social world. Although it
might be intuitively tempting to refer to a social world when we think and talk,
demarcating the social can often be surprisingly slippery. To demonstrate this, it
is necessary to look at a few different conceptions of where the social begins and
where the non-social (the natural) end. There are three relevant schools of
thought in this area, which I will refer to as the dialectical, the interpretive and
the cybernetic.

The dialectical conception of the social I attribute primarily to Hegel and Marx,
although it might be useful to discuss Schelling in this context as well. One of
the ways to think about dialectics is to think about the working-out of a
contradiction immanent to an underlying substance. In the case of Hegel, this
substance is mind/spirit, the contradiction deriving from its attempt to possess
absolute knowledge. The Hegelian dialectic thus moves from immediate
knowledge of a sense-certain world to mediated alienation from reality to
absolute knowledge when the mediation is suspended, and immediacy returns,
albeit at a higher level of abstraction.

Society is dealt with slightly differently in Hegel, Marx and Schelling. For
Schelling, the essential substance is nature, conceived of teleologically. Through
some sort of will-to-life, nature perpetuates itself, eventually giving birth to
man. Man is then understood as nature-reflecting-on-itself. Man is both
immanent to nature (he is a natural being), but is also able to objectify it, holding
it in thought. The social dimension (man and his various practices with other
men) is thus conceived of as emergent from the natural.

For Hegel, the picture is less clear. He speaks about both nature and society, but
he does not engage in much boundary-drawing. He has both a Philosophy of
Nature and a Philosophy of Society (in his Philosophy of Right and his
Phenomenology of Spirit), but it is unclear whether he feels the need to
distinguish these spheres in quite the way that Schelling does. Society does
not really exist as a separate sphere, as Hegel considers the social to be
essentially bound up with mind or spirit.
Although we cannot obviously deny that Human beings are natural beings, in the
sense of being natural, drawing a boundary between the social and the natural
is irrelevant to Hegel. Contrary to popular belief, he does think that nature exists
(although he would not ground it in the same way as many naturalists), but he
seems to regard it as other which thought struggles to comprehend.

The Marxian picture is a mix of both Hegel and Schelling. Marx places a lot more
emphasis on the materiality of the human being, describing his thought as
beginning from the premise of real, material men. He manages to draw the
distinction between the natural and the social