Nuno Martins reports on a summer school on Social Ontology held at Cambridge in August.
Nuno Martins
Feature image by Susan Evans.
Several researchers and students met for a week at beginning of August 2024 at Newnham College, Cambridge, to discuss social ontology. The week was divided into two closely related events, a three-day summer school on Cambridge Social Ontology, and a two-day workshop on Current Issues and Developments in Social Positioning Theory (SPT), the latter being an emergent approach within Cambridge Social Ontology.
The summer school, attended by about 30 students, comprised various lectures by Tony Lawson on the basic principles of SPT, the human person, distribution and emancipatory practice, and two further lectures, one on money by Stephen Pratten, and another one on the nature of the corporation by Yannick Slade-Caffarel.
The summer school also included various sessions with discussion groups comprised each of 10 students with one or two members of the Cambridge Social Ontology Group (CSOG), in which the topics presented in the lectures were debated in detail by.
The workshop consisted of numerous contributions addressing or dealing with SPT by various researchers, many of which (but not all) members of the CSOG. The workshop provided a forum for the further exploration of SPT, both in its applications to various topics, such as money, technology, power, epistemology, legal theory, and also assessing its relevance to interpreting various authors and traditions in the history of economic thought, such as Marx and Old Institutionalism. A roundtable also took place in order to take stock and discuss how SPT may move forward.
A general consensus amongst the various participants of both events seemed to be that the overall atmosphere was a friendly and stimulating one, making them both intellectually interesting and challenging and at the same time very enjoyable. The discussions contributed to furthering the study of SPT. But being a recent theory, SPT is also itself in a process of development. Thus, it is also natural that many questions remained unanswered, and will probably only be addressed in more detail in future contributions to the topic.
The range of application of SPT itself was a subject of debate during the week. SPT provides a characterisation of the nature of social reality, which is the part of reality that depends necessarily upon human activity. SPT studies the structure of social reality, especially where it is comprised of packages of rights and obligations that constitute social positions. An important set of distinctions drawn is between the social position, its occupant and the relational community component though the position being occupied. Components possess (system) functions. But successful functioning depends on capacities and dispositions of the occupant, which may be an object, or a person. There are thus object-positions, and person-positions.
The human person (that occupies social positions) was also a subject of debate throughout the week. This human person is endowed with a first-person perspective, and a biological organism, and is contrasted with the notion of a social individual who is the product of the person occupying multiple social positions simultaneously, which is the aspect addressed in SPT.
Social structures in the form of positional rights and obligations are continually reproduced and transformed through social practices. This assessment, which characterises SPT, stands in contrast to approaches where rights and obligations reside wholly in the minds of human individuals. The latter is John Searle’s conception, which is grounded on intentionality as a first-person perspective, and seems thus to be a phenomenological perspective, albeit adopting the methods of analytical philosophy, rather than those of continental philosophy, as it is typically (or at least historically) the case in phenomenology.
The relation between SPT and Searle’s perspective was one of the subjects discussed during the week. But in addition to the examining differences between SPT and other conceptions, it was recognised that there are still open questions in SPT, such as the nature of the relationship between the social structure of rights and obligations on the one hand, and the capacities and dispositions of the occupants of object-positions and person-positions on the other hand, as noted above.
These fundamental philosophical questions underpin the various debates taking place in the summer school and workshop, which as earlier noted were also concerned with more concrete applications of these fundamental philosophical ideas, The fact that the latter debates took place within a framework informed by deep philosophical foundations much contributed to the stimulating and challenging nature of the summer school and workshop, within a spirit of constructive criticism aimed at the further development of SPT.
