Social ontology and normativity

Social reality is instituted; it does not comprise a universe of things that is given by nature. On the contrary, it depends, in order to exist in the first place and to be maintained or modified, on the activity of people. Social reality, however, is also real; it exerts constraints, delimits ranges of possible actions, and is endowed with its own structure that means certain effects can only be achieved by mobilizing certain resources. The purpose of Social Ontology and Normativity is to examine these two attributes, of institution and reality, whose conjunction composes the social as a specific ontological domain.

Social Ontology and Normativity is a pragmatist study: it seeks to illuminate social reality as instituted and as real based on the conceptual links that connect it to human action. On the one hand, human action has an instituting dimension; it projects how social things should and should not be and, in this sense, evaluates them. Evaluation and normativity are not, therefore, abstract assessments, but acts aimed at maintaining or transforming social reality. On the other hand, human action flows through channels objectively given by social structures and, in this sense, simply adapts to them. This work insists on clearly delimiting these two aspects under which social reality is presented to action. In turn, it emphasizes the priority of the aspect of constraint, showing that actions aimed at transforming or maintaining certain fragments of social reality cannot but treat others as merely given.