Social Ontology 2025
I am headed to Dublin, Ireland for this year’s annual ISOS conference, Social Ontology 2025. This conference is the major conference for people interested in social ontology. It’s a huge conference, with hundreds of participants. Last year, I helped make it happen at Duke.
For my presentation, I am going to tackle the social/non-social distinction. Social ontologists assume that there is a division between the social facts and the non-social facts. Facts about colleges are social facts, for example. Facts about rocks are non-social, or natural.
I argue that there is no principled account of the social/non-social distinction. Even though the paradigm cases seem straightforward, the distinction collapses under scrutiny. I think the collapse of the distinction has pretty big implications for social ontology. Really big.
If you want to hear more and you’ll be at the conference, come through. You can find my talk time and location on the program.