Dr Naomi Thompson
Seminar
University of Bristol
This event has now finished.
Event date
Wednesday 2 April 2025, 4pm to 5.30pm
Location
I/A/009, Sally Baldwin Buildings, Campus West, University of York (Map)
Admission
Free admission, booking not required
Event details
Social Construction as Social Metaphysical Explanation
Recent works by Jonathan Schaffer and Aaron Griffith have offered accounts of social construction as grounding. In this paper, I argue that better suited for modelling social construction is metaphysical explanation, and further that this sort of metaphysical explanation should be taken to have various non-standard features. In particular, my account of social construction as social metaphysical explanation takes social metaphysical explanations to be context sensitive, holistic (and thus nonsymmetric), and non-factive. Driving this account is my contention that social construction requires that the concept the referent of which is to be constructed be salient in the context.