:: Calls :: Journal of Social Ontology (JSO) will publish a special section devoted to social kinds. The deadline for submissions is October 15, 2015. JSO is an interdisciplinary open-access journal on social ontology. It features scholarly work pertaining to the basic structures of the social world from a variety of disciplinary perspectives including moral, social and political philosophy, anthropology, cognitive science, economics, history, law, political science, and psychology.
Call for Papers: SOCIAL KINDS
Journal of Social Ontology (JSO) will publish a special section devoted to social kinds. The deadline for submissions is October 15, 2015.
JSO is an interdisciplinary open-access journal on social ontology. It features scholarly work pertaining to the basic structures of the social world from a variety of disciplinary perspectives including moral, social and political philosophy, anthropology, cognitive science, economics, history, law, political science, and psychology. Topics that JSO covers range from small-scale everyday interactions to encompassing societal institutions, from expert teams to hierarchical organizations, and from unintended consequences to institutional design. The journal provides a forum for exchanges between scholars of diverse disciplinary and methodological backgrounds. In addition to major articles, JSO publishes review essays, discussion articles, and book reviews. More info about the journal and instructions for authors can be found from http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/jso
Special Section: Social Kinds
Social kinds include money and marriage, recessions and unemployment, as well as race and gender. It is often argued that social kinds depend in some way on people’s attitudes, activities, habits and practices. Actions and attitudes of individuals may both determine what social kinds exist and what the particular nature of different social kinds is, and may causally bring about and sustain social kinds. Even so, social reality is “stubbornly real” in that the extent to which individuals can change it is rather limited. This raises a number of questions concerning the ontology of social kinds.
Questions to be addressed in the special section include (but are not limited to):
– THE NATURE OF SOCIAL KINDS: Are social kinds uniform, or might ‘money’ and ‘gender’ for instance be fundamentally different kinds? Does essentialism apply to any social kinds? Should we adopt some form of realism about them? What kind of ontological dependence is at stake? On what does the existence and identity of social kinds depend on?
– SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION: Social construction plays a central role in the debate on social kinds. What is it? And what role do social practices play in it? Is social construction merely a causal process, or is it also a matter of constitution? How can notions such as bootstrapping, or looping effects contribute to our understanding of social kinds?
– KNOWLEDGE: It has been argued that the knowledge that those who do the construction have about their constructs is infallible. Is this indeed the case, and if so does it hold for all social kinds (including recession and unemployment) or only for some (perhaps money and marriage)? Do social kinds depend on collective intentionality? Which social kinds, if any, require common knowledge? If social kinds require collective acceptance, is this part of the very concept of a social kind? Can people be mistaken about any feature of institutions, or do some have a privileged status?
– FUNCTION: Which functions do social kinds fulfill? Is the function of some or all social kinds to solve coordination problems? In which sense (if any) is a status function a function? (How) can social kinds be dysfunctional? Does analyzing social kinds in terms of (regulative or constitutive) rules serve to shed light on social functions?
– NATURAL KINDS: How if at all do social kinds differ from natural kinds? Which insights from the philosophical study concerning natural kinds extend to the study of social kinds? If social kinds are homeostatic property clusters, what holds those properties together? How do theories concerning substantial kinds or primary kinds apply to social reality? How does the ontological nature of social kinds affect the theory of reference to social kinds?Do the social sciences rely on social kinds in the same way as some have suggested that the natural sciences rely on natural kinds?
– NORMATIVITY: Many if not all social kinds have a normative or evaluative dimension. What roles do norms and appraisals play in social kinds? What role do deontic powers play in institutions? Might some social classifications (like gender and race categories) uphold unjust practices? If so, does this pose special problems for social criticism? How can the normative dimension of such social constructions be justified or criticized? How if at all are ideologies implicated in social kinds?
We welcome any paper-length submissions (up to 8500 words) related to the topic of social kinds, and not restricted to these questions. All submissions should be suitable for anonymous review. The deadline for submissions is October 15, 2015. For further info, please contactarto.laitinen[at]uta.fi; f.a.hindriks[at]rug.nl or mari.mikkola[at]hu-berlin.de.
Editor-in-Chief
Hans Bernhard Schmid (University of Vienna)
Editorial Assistant
Gerhard Thonhauser (University of Vienna)
Editors
Frank Hindriks (University of Groningen)
Heikki Ikäheimo (University of New South Wales, Sydney)
Arto Laitinen (University of Tampere)
Mari Mikkola (Humboldt University of Berlin)
David Schweikard (University of Münster)
Alessandro Salice (University of Copenhagen)
Advisory Board
Lynne Baker (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)
Monika Betzler (University of Bern)
Luc Bovens (London School of Economics and Political Science)
Robert Brandom (University of Pittsburgh)
Michael Bratman (Stanford University)
Judith Butler (University of California, Berkeley)
David Copp (University of California, Davis)
Vincent Descombes (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris)
Margaret Gilbert (University of California, Irvine)
Natalie Gold (Kings College, London)
Sally Haslanger (Mass. Institute of Technology, Cambridge)
Axel Honneth (University of Frankfurt)
Martin Kusch (University of Vienna)
Eerik Lagerspetz (University of Turku)
Tony Lawson (University of Cambridge)
Uskali Mäki (University of Helsinki)
Larry May (Vanderbilt University, Nashville)
Seumas Miller (Charles Sturt University and Delft University of Technology)
Élisabeth Pacherie (École Normale Supérieure, Paris)
Philip Pettit (Princeton University)
Michael Quante (University of Münster)
Carol Rovane (Columbia University, New York)
John Searle (University of California, Berkeley)
Barry Smith (University of Buffalo)
Robert Sugden (University of East Anglia)
Deborah P. Tollefson (Memphis State University)
Michael Tomasello (Max-Planck-Institut für Evolutionäre Anthropologie, Leipzig)
Raimo Tuomela (University of Helsinki)
Tarello Institute for Legal Philosophy 