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Structural explanations and norms: comments on Haslanger

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Abstract

Sally Haslanger undertakes groundbreaking work in developing an account of structural explanations and the social structures that figure in them. A chief virtue of the account is that it can show the importance of structural explanations while also respecting the role of individual autonomy in explaining many decisions, by demonstrating the way in which social structures may set up a ‘choice architecture’ in which these choices are made. This paper gives an overview of this achievement, and goes on to consider why there may be need to broaden the role of social structural explanations beyond those that involve explicit choice within a choice architecture. It develops the idea, familiar from work by Heidegger and Ingarden, that social artifacts, roles, and nodes in social structures may be constitutively defined by norms. It closes by suggesting that attention to the role of norms in social structures may enable us to broaden the account to include structural explanations of other kinds.

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Notes

  1. An idea like this also plays a role in Levinson’s (1979) analysis of a work of art as a thing intended for regard-as-a-work-of-art, that is for, regard in any of the ways prior works have been properly regarded.

  2. Risjord argues that “The primary role for norms in social scientific explanation is in the explanation of group-level phenomena”, not of explaining individual action, reinforcing the idea that norms may figure in large-scale structural explanations (2000, 155). He also discusses and responds to doubts that norms may figure in explanations.

  3. Haslanger elsewhere notes that “for these [social] roles… there are norms” that are typically internalized given a shared “cultural vocabulary” (2012, 10).

  4. Though in this case perhaps not constitutive norms.

  5. This again is in line with some points Haslanger herself makes elsewhere, for example that “in the practices of day-to-day life, the movement, location, and meaning of our bodies often has little to do with the agent’s conscious ness or intentions” (2012, 12).

References

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  • Ingarden, R. (1961/1989). The architectural work. In The ontology of the work of art (R. Meyer, Trans.). Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press.

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  • Risjord, M. W. (2000). Woodcutters and witchcraft: Rationality and interpretive change in the social sciences. Albany: SUNY Press.

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  • Thomasson, A. L. (2014). Public artifacts, intentions and norms. In M. Franssen, P. Kroes, T. Reydon, P. Vermaas, et al. (Eds.), Artefact kinds: Ontology and the human-made world. Synthese Library: Springer.

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Correspondence to Amie L. Thomasson.

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Thomasson, A.L. Structural explanations and norms: comments on Haslanger. Philos Stud 173, 131–139 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-014-0437-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-014-0437-2

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