This paper addresses the question what the fundamental nature and mode of being of institutional reality is. Besides the recent debate with Tony Lawson, Barry Smith is also one of the relatively few authors to have explicitly challenged John Searle's social ontology on this metaphysical question, with Smith's realism requirement for institutions conflicting with Searle's requirement of a one-world naturalism. This paper proposes that an account of institutions as powers or dispositions is not only congenial to Searle's general account, but (...) can also satisfy both the realism and the one world requirements. Searle's worry that such a dispositional account is unable to account for the deontic nature of institutions is countered by an appeal to higher-order powers as well as Searle's notion of the gap and desire-independent reasons for action. (shrink)

This paper proposes a theological grounding for the possibility of metaphysics. After a brief critique of the seeming contemporary revival of analytic philosophy as characterized by linguisticism, the two main sections give a Christological and ultimately Mariological foundation for the possibility of metaphysics. The Christological section starts with the role of the second person of the Trinity in creation, and subsequently points to the hypostatic union as ensuring that creation is therefore accessible to the human mind. It also implies that (...) reality is fundamentally of a personal nature, and that personal knowledge can be relatively unproblematically acquired by other persons. The Mariological section starts from Plato’s Diotima as a prefigurement of Mary, and subsequently portrays Mary as the perfect metaphysician, guaranteeing the possibility of metaphysics as an enterprise of natural reason. Doing justice to the critique of an at times overly naive pre-modern metaphysics can then be done by advocating a Christological and Mariological turn for the Copernican revolution, e.g. fully taking into account the historicity of being and thinking. In conclusion, Mary as the handmaid of the Lord is analogous to metaphysics as the handmaid of theology, in a relationship of a loving daughter, mother and bride. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to show that human persons belong, ontologically, in social ontology. After setting out my views on ontology, I turn to persons and argue that they have first-person perspectives in two stages (rudimentary and robust) essentially. Then I argue that the robust stage of the first-person persective is social, in that it requires a language, and languages require linguistic communities. Then I extend the argument to cover the rudimentary stage of the first-person perspective as well. (...) I conclude by enumerating ways in which human persons differ from nonhuman animals. (shrink)

Since heaven is the most perfect state or position possible – namely of loving God perfectly – and sinning is failing to love God, it will not be possible to sin in heaven. However, if freedom is a mark of perfection, and loving God is only possible when one freely loves God, will we be loving God at all if we are not free not to love him? Three cumulative arguments for an affirmative answer are developed. The first is to (...) distinguish the ability to love or sin from the opportunity to do so. In heaven we are loving God in an infinite variety of ways, so we are freely exercising our ability to love, even when God has taken away any opportunities for sinning. However, one might reply that our freedom will only be the freedom to love God in various ways, not the freedom to love God or not. Hence the second argument is that in heaven are only people who have freely chosen to love God while on earth, where there was a real opportunity not to love God. Since the free choice to love God was made before entering heaven, loving God in heaven remains a free choice. Moreover, since in heaven God takes away the opportunity to sin, and stopping to love God would be a sin, you will remain steadfast in that free choice. However, one might reply that also having the opportunity to sin would add an extra possibility for willing something, so one would be 'more free' in heaven, and heaven would be more perfect, if one would also have the opportunity to sin. Hence the third argument is that freedom is a perfection shared by both God and humans, and the freedom of God is in an important respect a freedom to create. Hence, our human freedom is also greater if our creative power is greater. We have no creative power but by participating in God’s creative power, which is necessarily directed towards the good. So by willing what is good we extend and perfect creation and thereby extend and perfect our possibilities for willing, hence we become more free. On the contrary, by sinning we destroy creation and possibilities for willing and we become less free, so an opportunity to sin is not a possibility that increases our freedom. (shrink)

Philosophy should not try to assimilate itself to the aims of the sciences. Scientism stems from the false assumption that a representation of the world minimally based on local perspectives is what best serves self-understanding. Philosophy must concern itself with the history of our conceptions, and we must overcome the need to think that this history should ideally be vindicatory. There is no basic conflict between arguing within the framework of our ideas, reflectively making better sense of them, and understanding (...) their highly contingent history. The third of these activities is an inescapable part of the second. (shrink)

Searle’s tool for understanding culture, law and society is the opposition between brute reality and institutional reality, or in other words between: observer-independent features of the world, such as force, mass and gravitational attraction, and observer-relative features of the world, such as money, property, marriage and government. The question posed here is: under which of these two headings do moral concepts fall? This is an important question because there are moral facts – for example pertaining to guilt and responsibility – (...) which hover uncomfortably close to the boundary between the observer-relative and the observer-independent. By means of a thought experiment involving an imagined Chinese society in which guilt is determined by the random throwing of sticks, I seek to show that moral concepts threaten the foundations of Searle’s philosophy of social reality. (shrink)

Construing ontology as an inventory of what genuinely and nonredundantly exists, this paper investigates two questions: (i) Do all – or any – social phenomena belong in ontology? and (ii) What difference does it make what is, and is not, in ontology? First, I consider John Searle’s account of social ontology, and make two startling discoveries: Searle’s theory of social reality conflicts with his ontological conditions of adequacy; and although ontology concerns existence, Searle’s theory of social reality is wholly epistemic. (...) Then, I offer my own view of social reality, on which social phenomena are ontologically significant. Since ontology concerns what genuinely and nonredundantly exists, anyone interested in what there is ought to care about ontology. (shrink)

The issue of what distinguishes systems which have original intentionalityfrom those which do not has been brought into sharp focus by Saul Kripke inhis discussion of the sceptical paradox he attributes to Wittgenstein.In this paper I defend a sophisticated version of the dispositionalistaccount of meaning against the principal objection raised by Kripke in hisattack on dispositional views. I argue that the objection put by the sceptic,to the effect that the dispositionalist cannot give a satisfactory account ofnormativity and mistake, in fact (...) comprises a number of distinct lines ofargument, all of which can be satisfactorily answered by the dispositionalist.Two central problems raised by the sceptic consist in explaining (1) theextension of the term which a subject uses, and (2) the fact that the subjectintends to use the term with that extension, and is thus justified in her use.I adapt a suggestion of Blackburn's, that the extension of a word is fixed bya person's extended first-order dispositions to use it, and suggest that thereis no coherent possibility of a subject being disposed to makesystematic mistakes in connection with many ordinary words; the scepticalproblem does not apply in the same way throughout language. It is furtherargued that an account which appeals to a subject's second-orderdispositions to maintain a consistent pattern of extended first-orderdispositions to use words is able to provide a naturalistic basis to answerthe normative questions about justification of use. Three other variants ofthe mistake objection which are also revealed by a careful examination ofKripke's arguments are distinguished and it is shown that the dispositionalisthas adequate resources to meet them.The appeal to second-order dispositions provides a principled way ofdistinguishing between those systems (animal or machine) which have originalintentionality, and those which do not. (shrink)

God’s Willing Knowledge argued that Scotus should be seen as offering a non-libertarian view of freedom. Some critics of this interpretation point to Scotus’s texts that offer a synchronic view of possibility, which is seen as necessarily implying a libertarian view. Other critics point to the debt that Scotus owes to his libertarian predecessors and argue that Scotus follows their view. In order to address these critics, in the first section of the paper, some of the thinkers Scotus draws upon (...) or reacts to in forming his views about freedom are examined. It turns out that Scotus’s non-libertarian view of freedom as it relates to divine omniscience is rather typical of medieval views. In the subsequent sections of the paper, Scotus’s texts are examined to show his non-libertarian views. Moreover, various criticisms offered against the argument of God’s Willing Knowledge are answered. (shrink)

This paper sets out an organizing framework for the field of social ontology, the study of the nature of the social world. The subject matter of social ontology is clarified, in particular the difference between it and the study of causal relations and the explanation of social phenomena. Two different inquiries are defined and explained: the study of the grounding of social facts, and the study of how social categories are “anchored” or set up. The distinction between these inquiries is (...) used to clarify prominent programs in social theory, particularly theories of practice and varieties of individualism. (shrink)

Consider a game of blind chess between two chess masters that is recorded in some standard chess notation. The recording is a representation of the game. But what is the game itself? This question is, we believe, central to the entire domain of social ontology. We argue that the recorded game is a special sort of quasi-abstract pattern, something that is: (i) like abstract entities such as numbers or forms, in that it is both nonphysical and nonpsychological; but at the (...) same time, (ii) through its association with specific players and a specific occasion, tied to time and history. We discover other abstract patterns of this sort especially in the domains of law and commerce. This essay draws on the work in social ontology, we of Hernando de Soto and of John Searle to develop an ontology of the social world based on an analysis of the peculiar interdependence between quasi-abstract patterns and their representations in documents of different sorts. (shrink)