Open Access Published since December 20, 2014

Journal of Social Ontology

ISSN: 2196-9663

Editor-in-chief: Hans Bernhard Schmid

Edited by: Frank Hindriks, Heikki Ikäheimo, Katharine Jenkins, Arto Laitinen, Alessandro Salice, Katherine Ritchie, David Schweikard, Gerhard Thonhauser

Managing Editor: Niels de Haan

About this journal

Objective

The Journal of Social Ontology (JSO) is an interdisciplinary journal devoted to social ontology and collective intentionality. JSO 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. The 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.

Topics

Social ontology and collective intentionality
Basic structures of the social world
Interdisciplinary perspective including moral, social and political philosophy, sociology, anthropology, cognitive science, human sciences, economics, history, law, political science, and psychology

Journal of Social Ontology Peer Review Policy

The Journal of Social Ontology practices double-blind peer review. This means that the identity of the author will remain unknown to the referees and the referees will remain anonymous to the author. All submissions receive an initial editorial review (i.e. desk review). Submissions that are rejected at this stage will not be accompanied by a report. Submissions that are not rejected at this stage will be send to at least two independent referees that are experts in the relevant subfield(s) selected by the Editors.
The Journal of Social Ontology is committed to maintaining the highest standards of scholarly rigor and requires two (2) positive reviews by independent reviewers as well as the Editorial Board’s approval for any decision to publish. Reviewers must be in no relevant relationship to the author, i.e. they cannot be affiliated with the same institutions or function(ed) as a supervisor. It is sometimes not possible to provide two reports for all manuscripts and the editorial staff will occasionally provide a decision with one report—though generally all submissions not rejected in the initial review will be returned along with two (2) reports.
The Journal of Social Ontology does not accept simultaneous submissions—discovery that a manuscript is under consideration for publication at another journal will result in immediate rejection of the manuscript.

History

History

Journal of Social Ontology was founded 2015. It is supported by International Social Ontology Society.

Other publications in the field

SATS. Northern European Journal of Philosophy
Moral Philosophy and Politics
Kairos. Journal of Philosophy and Science
Zeitschrift für kritische Sozialtheorie und Philosophie

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Supplementary Materials

Topics

External Links

Volume 7 Issue 1

February 2021

Accessible July 26, 2021

Frontmatter

Page range: i-ii

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Articles

Open Access March 29, 2021

We in Me or Me in We? Collective Intentionality and Selfhood

Dan Zahavi

Page range: 1-20

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Abstract

The article takes issue with the proposal that dominant accounts of collective intentionality suffer from an individualist bias and that one should instead reverse the order of explanation and give primacy to the we and the community. It discusses different versions of the community first view and argues that they fail because they operate with too simplistic a conception of what it means to be a self and misunderstand what it means to be (part of) a we. In presenting this argument, the article seeks to demonstrate that a thorough investigation of collective intentionality has to address the status and nature of the we, and that doing so will require an analysis of the relation between the we and the I, which in turn will call for a more explicit engagement with the question of selfhood than is customary in contemporary discussions of collective intentionality.

Open Access April 22, 2021

Feeling Joint Ownership of Agency: The Normative Aspect of Agency Transformation

Jonas Faria Costa

Page range: 21-44

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Abstract

Team reasoning is the idea that we can think as a ‘we’ and this can solve some coordination dilemmas, such as Hi-Lo. However, team reasoning can only solve the dilemmas it is intended to solve if the conditions for team reasoning warrant the belief that others will also perform team reasoning and these conditions cannot render team reasoning otiose. In this paper, I will supplement the theory of team reasoning by explaining how agency transformation also involves a change in the normative attitude. To do this, I will use the theory of affordances, which is the idea that the environment provides ways to interact with it. I will argue that when a person perceives as a group member, she associates herself and the other members with the group’s mosaic of affordances. This triggers a feeling of joint ownership of the agency. It is the feeling that it is up to us to deal with the situation, so we feel entitled to demand each other to cooperate. It warrants the belief that others are team-reasoners without rendering team reasoning otiose. This means that the agency transformation (from I to we ) involves a change in the normative attitude.

Open Access June 21, 2021

Why They Know Not What They Do: A Social Constructionist Approach to the Explanatory Problem of False Consciousness

Lee Wilson

Page range: 45-72

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Abstract

False consciousness requires a general explanation for why, and how, oppressed individuals believe propositions against, as opposed to aligned with, their own well-being in virtue of their oppressed status. This involves four explanatory desiderata: belief acquisition, content prevalence, limitation, and systematicity. A social constructionist approach satisfies these by understanding the concept of false consciousness as regulating social research rather than as determining the exact mechanisms for all instances: the concept attunes us to a complex of mechanisms conducing oppressed individuals to mistake social understandings of themselves as natural self-understandings—the limits lie where these overlap, or are entirely absent.

Open Access April 23, 2021

The Beliefs-Rules-Equilibrium Account of Institutions: A Contribution to a Naturalistic Social Ontology

Cyril Hédoin

Page range: 73-96

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Abstract

This paper pursues a naturalist endeavor in social ontology by arguing that the Beliefs-Rules-Equilibrium account of institutions can help to advance the debate over the nature of social kinds. This account of institutions emerges from a growing number of works in economics that use game theory to study the role and the functioning of institutions in human societies. I intend to show how recent developments in the economic analysis of rules and institutions can help solve issues that are generally considered constitutive of any ontological inquiry. I argue that the Beliefs-Rules-Equilibrium account of institutions can contribute to advancing the debate on an issue of particular importance, regarding the specific form of dependence characterizing the relation between institutions and individuals’ attitudes about them. I tackle this issue by taking Francesco Guala's claims about the nature of institutions made in his book “Understanding Institutions” as a point of departure. In particular, I reject Guala’s functionalism about institutions. On the basis of the Beliefs-Rules-Equilibrium account, I claim that it is futile to search for constitutive features of general institutions (money, property rights, family…) and that the best we can have is a knowledge of what are the rules within a specific institution, which the agents consider to be essential in their institutional practice.

Open Access April 14, 2021

Joint Improvisation, Minimalism and Pluralism about Joint action

Pierre Saint-Germier, Cédric Paternotte, Clément Canonne

Page range: 97-118

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Abstract

This paper introduces freely improvised joint actions, a class of joint actions characterized by (i) highly unspecific goals and (ii) the unavailability of shared plans. For example, walking together just for the sake of walking together with no specific destination or path in mind provides an ordinary example of FIJAs, along with examples in the arts, e.g., collective free improvisation in music, improv theater, or contact improvisation in dance. We argue that classic philosophical accounts of joint action such as Bratman’s rule them out because the latter require a capacity for planning that is idle in the case of FIJAs. This argument is structurally similar to arguments for minimalist accounts of joint action (e.g., based on joint actions performed by children before they develop a full-fledged theory of mind), and this invites a parallel minimalist account, which we provide in terms of a specific kind of shared intentions that do not require plan states. We further argue that the resulting minimalist account is different in kind from the sort of minimalism suggested by developmental considerations and conclude in favor of a pluralistic minimalism, according to which there are several ways for an account of joint action to be minimal.

Open Access July 23, 2021

Collective Action and Social Ontology in Thomas Aquinas

Joshua Harris

Page range: 119-141

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Abstract

In this paper I argue that there are resources in the work of Thomas Aquinas that amount to a unique approach to what David P. Schweikard and Hans Bernhard Schmid’s call the “Central Problem” facing theorists of collective intentionality and action. That is to say, Aquinas can be said to affirm both (1) the “Individual Ownership Claim” and (2) the “Irreducibility Claim,” coherently and compellingly. Regarding the Individual Ownership Claim, I argue that Aquinas’s concept of “general virtue” ( virtus generalis ) buttresses an account of the way in which individuals act collectively qua individuals, i.e., without invoking hive minds or other scientifically problematic phenomena. Further, with respect to the Irreducibility Claim (2), I argue that Aquinas’s concept of “common good” ( bonum commune ) offers an account of the way in which some powers and acts of social groups are importantly irreducible to those of their members. Considered together, I argue that these two positions in Aquinas are correlative, and therefore amount to a coherent account of collective action and group agency, respectively.

Ahead of Print / Just Accepted

Ahead of Print / Just Accepted

Volume 7 (2021)

Issue 1

Volume 6 (2020)

Volume 5 (2019)

Volume 4 (2018)

Volume 3 (2017)

Volume 2 (2016)

Volume 1 (2015)

Cite Score	1.3
SCImago Journal Rank	0.540
Source Normalized Impact per Paper	2.125

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Your benefits of publishing with us

JSO uses double-blind peer review
Renowned, international Editorial Board
Open Access
No article processing charges (APCs) nor article submission charges
Every article easily discoverable because of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and comprehensive abstracting and indexing services
Secure archiving by De Gruyter and the independent archiving service Portico
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Article formats

Articles, review essays, discussion articles, and book reviews

Submission

Before submitting your article please have a look at the Instructions_for_Authors

You can easily submit your manuscript online. Simply go to...

http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/social

...and you will be guided through the whole peer-reviewing and publishing process.

Submission process

Instructions_for_Authors
Double-blinded peer review
Commitment to a rapid decision on your paper
Ahead-of-Print publication
Print and online publication

Please note

Before submitting your article, please have a look at our Publication Ethics and Publication Malpractice Statement as well as the Copyright Agreement.
Our Repository Policy allows you to distribute 30 PDF copies of your published article to colleagues (the PDF has to include the information that it is an author’s copy). Please also feel free to distribute the link to the online abstract.
If you have any general questions please visit our FAQ for authors

We look forward to receiving your manuscript!

Editorial

Editor-in-Chief
Hans Bernhard Schmid (University of Vienna)

Editorial Assistant
Niels de Haan (University of Vienna)

Editorial Office
Universität Wien
Institut für Philosophie
Universitätsstraße 7
1010 Wien
Austria

Review Editor
David P. Schweikard
david.schweikard@uni-flensburg.de

We kindly ask publishers to send books (to be reviewed) to:

Prof. Dr. David P. Schweikard
Europa-University Flensburg
Department of Philosophy
Auf dem Campus 1a
24943 Flensburg
Germany

Editors
Frank Hindriks (University of Groningen)
Heikki Ikäheimo (University of New South Wales, Sydney)
Katharine Jenkins (University of Glasgow)
Arto Laitinen (University of Tampere)
Katherine Ritchie (University of California, Irvine)
Alessandro Salice (University College Cork)
David Schweikard (University of Flensburg)
Gerhard Thonhauser (Technical University of Darmstadt) Former Editors:
Mari Mikkola (Oxford University)

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)
Barry Smith (University of Buffalo)
Robert Sugden (University of East Anglia)
Deborah P. Tollefsen (Memphis State University)
Michael Tomasello (Max-Planck-Institut für Evolutionäre Anthropologie, Leipzig)
Raimo Tuomela (University of Helsinki)

(Deutsch)

Type: Journal
Language: English
Publisher: De Gruyter
First published: December 20, 2014
Publication Frequency: 2 Issues per Year
Audience: Scholars and students from a variety of disciplinary perspectives including moral, social and political philosophy, sociology, anthropology, cognitive science, human sciences, economics, history, law, political science, and psychology
Keywords: Social Ontology; Collective Intentionality; Social and Institutional Facts; Cooperation; Social Cognition, Norms and Conventions