About
A central challenge for the field of social ontology is to explicate the distinctively normative dimension of social categories, or ‘kinds’, while also doing justice to their epistemic functions. NORSK addresses this challenge with a uniquely interdisciplinary suite of methods and resources. Its core insight is that social categories are simultaneously real and normative.
In exploring this insight, the project will start out from a detailed investigation of paradigmatic ‘folk’ and scientific categories, revealing how norms and values play important epistemic roles in stabilising behaviour and facilitating inferences across social properties. In particular, it will develop and assess the novel hypothesis that norms and values ‘anchor’ the success of inferential practices, helping to fix the extension of social categories.
A key working hypothesis is that kinds facilitate coordination by providing cues and signals that modulate normative attitudes and expectations in joint action contexts. Such cues and signals are culturally situated, and may also depend on dispositions that vary across social groups and cultures. NORSK aims to identify the cultural parameters and individual differences which underlie this variance.
Integrating the methods of cognitive neuroscience, cross-cultural and comparative psychology, the project will also investigate the cognitive and social mechanisms which underpin social normativity. The project will investigate protoforms of normativity in other species (wolves, birds, and chimps), and thereby home in on those aspects which are uniquely human.
Finally, it will also probe cultural and individual factors that regulate various forms of punishment and partner selection, as well as the ways in which these mechanisms are efficacious in sustaining the normative attitudes that ‘glue’ social kinds together.
Social Ontology Unit
The Social Ontology Unit addresses the complex epistemic (inductive) and non-epistemic (normative) functions of social kinds. It starts with the hypothesis that social kinds function as correlation devices that facilitate coordination by providing situated cues and signals which shape normative attitudes and expectations in joint action. It conjectures that categorisation and classificatory decisions are informed by value judgments, and in particular that values provide an anchor for successful inferential practices, by helping to fix the extension of social categories. From a methodological perspective, the social ontology unit aims at developing theoretical tools (topological models, specifically) for the representation and analysis of kinds. It also relies on case studies from economics, anthropology and sociology, to inform its theoretical insights.
Background Publications:
- Guala, F. (2016) Understanding Institutions. Princeton University Press.
- Griffiths, P. E. (2004). Emotions as natural and normative kinds. Philosophy of Science, 71, 901-911.
- Gardenfors, P. (2004). Conceptual Spaces. MIT press.
Social Cognition Unit
The Social Cognition Unit investigates the epistemic and normative functions of social kinds across individuals, cultures, and species. A key objective is to identify the parameters that influence how normatively laden cues are weighed across different social and cultural contexts, and to explore whether normativity is uniquely human or observable in proto-forms in other species through comparative research. The social cognition unit combines empirical methods such as behavioural and physiological experiments, and field observation of both animal and human interactions. It analyses the social mechanisms sustaining cooperation, focusing on punishment and partner (de-) selection, and examining how cultural and individual differences affect their effectiveness in stabilising the normative attitudes and expectations that underpin social coordination.
Background Publications:
- Michael, J. (2021). The Philosophy and Psychology of Commitment. Taylor & Francis.
- Bicchieri, C. (2006). The Grammar of Society. Cambridge University Press.
- Heintz, C., et al (2015). Facing expectations: Those that we prefer to fulfil and those that we disregard. Judgment and Decision Making, 10, 442-455.