Amie L. Thomasson (2003), ProtoSociology 18/19 (Understanding the Social II – Philosophy of Sociality), pp. 269–290 — DOI-10.5840/protosociology200318/199
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-02 at the owner’s request, as one of the works filling out the record’s coverage of social ontology under the topic ADR-017 added.
Unavailable because no lawful full text was reachable, so it is not read and no
NOTE is filed. What follows is only the publisher’s abstract.
The abstract, verbatim from the Philosophy Documentation Center: “The existence of a social world raises both the metaphysical puzzle: how can there be a ‘reality’ of facts and objects that are genuinely created by human intentionality? and the epistemological puzzle: how can such a product of human intentionality include objective facts available for investigation and discovery by the social sciences? I argue that Searle’s story about the creation of social facts in The Construction of Social Reality is too narrow to fully solve either side of the puzzle. By acknowledging different forms of rules for constructing social reality paralleling rules for creating ‘make-believe’ truths, we can build a more comprehensive social ontology and allow for a more appropriate range of discovery for the social sciences. Nonetheless, I argue that despite the parallels between methods for constructing make-believe and social facts, it would be mistaken to treat talk about social reality as involving a mere pretense to refer.”
Where it sits. Its target is Searle’s social ontology (The Construction of Social Reality, LIT-485, filed unread in the same batch; its 2006 restatement, LIT-482, is read). That is a different Searle subject from the Chinese Room the record already holds (LIT-400). The epistemological puzzle is Durkheim’s methodological question (LIT-484) in a later vocabulary: how social facts, made by people, can be objects of discovery. Ritchie (LIT-486) cites later Thomasson papers (“Social Entities”, 2009, and “The Ontology of Social Groups”) and thanks Thomasson for the amendment that norm-bound members count as members (its n. 21); she does not cite this one. Nothing seen bears on the group-agency or group-mind works.
Topic. social-ontology is primary. metaphysics holds the reality
puzzle, epistemology and philosophy-of-science hold the question of
discovery in the social sciences.
No instruction for machine-learning practice appears in what was seen, so nothing here points to the Anthology of the SOTA.
What a reading should check.
- What forms of rule beyond Searle’s “X counts as Y in C” the paper proposes, and what they let the social sciences discover that Searle’s cannot.
- Why talk of social reality is not pretence if its rules parallel make-believe.
- Whether any of the rules create groups, which would connect it to Ritchie.