Past Event: Philosophy Dept. Colloquium: Jonathan Schaffer (Rutgers)

Title: Staging the Social

Abstract: Social reality has a certain structure, which I aim to model. There is a pre-social level of organisms interacting in ecosystems, which constitute a basic social level of communities with resources. This much social reality is found even in ant colonies. Above this basic social level grows socially constructed reality, which sprouts with the right intentional nutrients, and which blossoms upwards in a rooted, branching, and iterable structure. I develop models—stage models—intended to capture how socially constructed reality flowers from the social ground. Stage models are useful, I claim, for limning this structure of social reality, clarifying the role of intentionality, requiring only ground-theoretic ideology, and connecting to our best formalism for intervention and explanation.