Social Ontology

Social phenomena often appear ambiguous. A comment at work may seem like harmless flirting when it is actually harassment; a police officer stopping a car may look like a routine procedure while functioning as racial profiling; a campaign to “end autism” may present itself as benefiting those affected by it, even though it reproduces ableist and eugenic narratives; and “flexible workhours” may, more accurately, signal overexploitation. How can we reliably know whether certain behaviors are recognizable patterns of discrimination, exploitation and (...) domination rather than just random inconvenient incidents? This dissertation advances the idea that social movements are principal agents in discerning such patterns because they are experts in uncovering social injustice. It specifically argues that social movements provide the training grounds for such expertise. Their experimental, versatile, and dynamic nature, as expressed in the various organizational forms that social movements have inhabited throughout their history, has a distinctive epistemic dimension: it cultivates the epistemic virtues that sharpen the accuracy of the movement’s theoretical glasses. The dissertation makes use of contemporary tools of analytical metaphysics and epistemology to spell out a realist defense of social movements’ epistemic powers. (shrink)

Traditional political typologies (monarchy, republic, dictatorship) are often static or normative, failing to explain the dynamics of regime transitions and structural collapses. This article applies the "Identity Compass" model (Lamory, 2026) to political science, mapping regimes not as fixed points but as trajectories on a dynamic 16-meridian sphere. It posits that sociological entities emerge from universal identity functions (innate drives) and organize into three ontological zones: Synergy, Autonomy, and Blockage. A central innovation is the postulate of "pathological symbiosis": a Blockage (...) regime persists only if its diametrically opposing entity also inverts its nature, creating a mutual structural lock. The analysis demonstrates that dynamic equilibrium (Synergy) constitutes full functionality, while Blockage states are structural anomalies dependent on the corruption of the opposite. The model offers a formal, falsifiable ontology of political regimes, establishing strict criteria for invalidation based on the absence of such symbiotic corruption. By linking regimes to innate drives, the framework suggests political trajectories are mechanical responses to existential needs rather than historical accidents. (shrink)

Economic theory has developed sophisticated accounts of scarcity, exchange, production, distribution, growth, equilibrium, crisis, and institutional adaptation. A further philosophical question concerns the capacity of an economic order to continue when the conditions constituting its problems are themselves transformed through economic action. This article develops that question through the ontology of Finite Continuance. The central claim is that economic continuance consists in the preservation of reconfigurative capacity under conditions of scarcity, erosion, crisis, and structural transformation. An economic problem can change (...) through the attempts made to solve it. A policy designed to address one form of scarcity can alter prices, incentives, dependencies, technologies, expectations, and patterns of distribution, thereby generating a transformed problem. Continuance consequently requires an economic capacity to reorganize in response to problems whose structures are themselves changing. The article develops four interconnected arguments. First, scarcity is treated as a dynamic economic relation whose significance depends upon production, distribution, technological organization, institutional access, and temporal conditions. Second, the transformation of ordinary goods into luxury goods and the diffusion of formerly luxurious goods into ordinary consumption reveal two directions of economic reclassification. Third, economic power is interpreted as differential control over the conditions of reconfiguration, including temporal reserve, institutional access, exit capacity, and the ability to absorb or impose erosive costs. Fourth, economic crisis is conceptualized as transformation of the problem itself. This perspective extends conventional discussions of resilience by identifying reconfigurative capacity as a distinct criterion of economic continuance. The resulting framework contributes a philosophical vocabulary for analyzing political economy under chronic instability while preserving a distinction between conceptual ontology and empirical economic measurement. The article also engages contemporary literature on capabilities, institutionalism, complexity, ecological economics, and feminist political economy, proposes a set of measurable indicators for reconfigurative capacity, examines a range of case studies, and offers deeper responses to anticipated objections. -/- Keywords: Finite Continuance, political economy, scarcity, economic crisis, reconfigurative capacity, erosion, economic power, economic change, homeorhesis, political economy of erosion, capability approach, resilience, institutional economics. (shrink)

Some young adults perform the work they are given but do not move into roles in which they would take up its outcomes and continuation as their own. They may care about the future and wish to contribute, yet avoid responsibility, mentoring, and long-term commitment, sometimes with the thought that "nothing I do matters." Starting from observations in hiring interviews and newcomer training in Japan, this paper theorizes the pattern as the Stability Complex (SC). SC is defined as an emotionally (...) charged psychological complex in which a desired involvement conflicts with underformation of the experience and capacity needed to respond, and the conflict is handled through defense and avoidance that further narrow the conditions for later participation. The definition contains no specific cause. As a separate and testable hypothesis, the paper proposes the stable substitution of formative participation as a characteristic pathway, in which others or institutions repeatedly absorb nonparticipation while current outcomes remain intact. The paper distinguishes a conflicted phase from a resigned phase in which desire itself may be lowered, identifies defense by its temporal function rather than by the content of explanations, differentiates SC from self-determination and learned helplessness accounts, and develops seven groups of testable predictions. SC is located in the person, while its formation and maintenance are partly socially structured. The paper concludes by challenging resignation without treating explanation as either blame or exemption from response. (shrink)

This paper develops a general account of how operational shapes penetrate reality: how locally generated differences propagate beyond their initial configuration and alter subsequent physical, informational, biological, technological, institutional, or extraterrestrial possibilities. Penetration is distinguished from representation, correlation, and local causal effect by requiring a difference to survive or transform across changes of medium, scale, temporal interval, address, or organizational boundary while continuing to modify downstream reachability. Xeno-Time analyzes the heterogeneous temporal rates through which such effects persist, decay, synchronize, or (...) become irreversible. Address Domain identifies where an operational difference can be retained, reactivated, or coupled to later consequences without presupposing a single enduring subject or carrier. The Ziran System provides a distributed architecture for tracking observation, intervention, memory, and feedback across heterogeneous configurations, while Xenoscience extends the analysis to scientific systems whose variables, boundaries, and observational conditions remain revisable. Embodiment and institutions provide contrasting cases in which penetration reorganizes bodily coordination, social constraints, authority, and resource access. Xenocapital tracks the conversion of such differences into differential future reachability through infrastructure and resource concentration. Off-planet operation tests whether these relations remain identifiable when terrestrial bodies, institutions, temporal rhythms, and infrastructures no longer provide the default configuration. The broader claim is that reality penetration should be identified by configuration-crossing changes in subsequent possibilities, not merely by the persistence of a representation or the occurrence of an isolated effect. (shrink)

Abstract In a village on Hirado, an old man leads prayers in a mixture of Latin, Portuguese and archaic Japanese that he no longer understands, and says that his community cannot go back to the faith its ancestors hid. In Trebizond in 1857, crypto-Christian leaders petition the Ottoman authorities on behalf of fifty-eight settlements, asking that their people be recognised as the Christians they had secretly been for generations. In Mashhad, women carry Torah scrolls under the veil that Islamic modesty (...) requires of them, and the men of the community make the pilgrimage to Mecca. In Salvador in 1983, five priestesses declare that the identification of their gods with Catholic saints was a product of slavery and must end, and in the years that follow only one of their houses holds to the separation. In Rome in 1440, a humanist shows from its Latin that the document on which papal temporal claims rested for centuries is a forgery. And between 1609 and 1614, the Moriscos of Spain are put on ships, and whatever they had concealed is never disclosed in Spain at all. This article applies the programme’s theory of authorship and its forgery to the comparative study of religions. It does so under a neutrality rule: the theory judges neither the truth of any revelation nor the worth of any tradition, and “origin” is indexed throughout to the tradition’s own account of where its forms come from. Within that rule, four results are shown to hold for the human and institutional layer of religion. Forged religious authority obeys the Competence Theorem (T1). Regimes that compel belief, rather than conduct, maximise the forgery surface and produce organised crypto-communities (T2). Persecution produces counter-forgery, and the fidelity of the cover is the vehicle of the concealed faith’s survival (T3). The institutional capture of charisma is an occupation, with the destinations the programme’s destination rule assigns (T4). The fifth result is the article’s own. When control over a concealed religion is relaxed, four outcomes occur (resurfacing, absorption, dissolution and exit), and they are predicted chiefly by one variable, the community’s access to an external reference during concealment, together with the length of concealment. The prediction follows from the programme’s IRM Impossibility Theorem, which holds that a self-maintaining system without external reference drifts from its target. A concealed faith is such a system, and its drift has a direction: toward the cover it performs every day. Where reference is lost for long enough, the cover becomes the community’s own origin. The name is kept, the origin changes, and the result is not a forgery, because the new origin is the community itself. The article calls this the Absorption Theorem (T5) and draws from it the programme’s first account of how a counter-forgery can end in authenticity. Keywords: crypto-religion; counter-forgery; syncretism; forgery; pseudepigraphy; religious persecution; toleration; external reference; comparative religion; authorship; Philosophy of Virtues Highlights • A theory of authorship can compare religions without judging them, if “origin” is indexed to each tradition’s own account of its sources. • Regimes that compel belief produce crypto-communities; regimes that compel only conduct produce conformity (T2). Locke saw the first half. • A persecuted faith survives behind a cover, and the better the cover, the longer it survives (T3). • When persecution ends, hidden communities resurface, absorb their cover, dissolve, or leave. Which one they do is predicted by whether they kept contact with an external reference, and for how long they were without it (T5). • The cover drifts into the faith because it is performed every day. Where reference is lost, the cover becomes the origin. • Keeping the name while changing the origin is forgery when a power supplies the new origin, and authorship when the community does. Relevance Crypto-religions are usually studied one at a time, by specialists in Japanese Christianity, Iberian Jewry, Ottoman social history or Afro-Brazilian religion, and the question of what happens to them when persecution ends is answered separately in each field. The cases have not been compared under a single account, and the recurring observation that some hidden communities return to the open faith while others refuse to has no general explanation. This article offers one, derived from a result about self-maintaining systems rather than from any theology, and states five registered hypotheses under which it can fail. (shrink)

This paper analyzes a phenomenon in Japanese social media firestorms in which no single participant assumes responsibility for the full force of a strong accusation, yet the aggregate interaction nevertheless produces an effect equivalent to collective condemnation. I call this phenomenon “condemnation without assertion.” -/- Rather than treating online firestorms merely as products of misinformation, moral outrage, polarization, or majority illusion, the paper develops a dynamic account of how condemnation can preserve itself by changing the grounds on which it is (...) justified over time. Weak suspicion may acquire social plausibility through heterogeneous third-party reactions; those reactions may appear more independent and more semantically homogeneous than they actually are; and visible agreement may then be transformed into apparent social common sense, normative legitimacy, and a public obligation for the target to respond. -/- The paper introduces and connects a series of concepts including pseudo-independent convergence, normative compression, normativization of subjective thresholds of consideration, pooling of normative legitimacy, motivational opacity, issue proliferation, asymmetry of intervention costs, participatory closure, the temporal disadvantage of clarification, asymmetric narrative closure, and retrospective legitimation through fault. -/- Its central proposal is a self-preserving condemnation model in which the output of one stage becomes the input of the next. Even when the original factual suspicion weakens or collapses, condemnation may persist by shifting its normative basis toward manners, attitude, silence, procedural delay, or attributed fault. -/- The broader philosophical problem is one of distributed responsibility. Individual contributions may remain weak, heterogeneous, or difficult to aggregate into a single intentional act, while the reputational, procedural, and temporal consequences imposed on the target remain concentrated. Responsibility may be distributed, but consequences are not. (shrink)

Contemporary digitalization is commonly described through the languages of innovation, connectivity, efficiency, and technological progress. This article argues that such descriptions remain incomplete because they primarily measure what digital systems enable while insufficiently examining what they progressively consume. Drawing on the ontology of finite continuance, the article develops an erosive account of digital existence in which the central problem is not technological mediation as such, but the systematic narrowing of the subject's capacity to revise the determinations through which its future (...) becomes possible. The concept of the Extracted Dasein names a condition in which a person may remain behaviorally functional, productive, connected, and apparently autonomous while undergoing a progressive extraction of reconfigurative capacity. This revised edition situates the framework more precisely within the philosophy of technology by engaging Bernard Stiegler's account of grammatization and tertiary retention, by distinguishing Extracted Dasein explicitly from Byung-Chul Han's burnout society and Shoshana Zuboff's surveillance capitalism, and by proposing operational indicators for the framework's central empirically testable claims. The article proceeds through six conceptual interventions culminating in an Ethics of Sufficiency grounded in the principle of non-appropriation of the future, and proposes Responsible Suspension and regulated permeability through the Dynamic Mask as mechanisms for preserving reconfigurative capacity. The article does not claim that digital technology inherently produces ontological erosion; it identifies a structural tendency within particular forms of digital organization and argues that technological progress must be evaluated not only by increased capability, speed, or predictive accuracy, but by whether it preserves the conditions under which finite beings can remain capable of becoming otherwise. -/- Keywords: finite continuance; Extracted Dasein; digital ontology; erosive ontology; algorithmic governance; Simondon; Stiegler; grammatization; teleological emergence; Ethics of Sufficiency; Responsible Suspension; Dynamic Mask; reconfigurative capacity; non-appropriation of the future. (shrink)

In the social world, our lives are informed, impacted, and controlled by time. Behind this grand saying there is the phenomenon of making time. More precisely, there are acts and processes, largely conventional and oftentimes institutional, that create temporal fiat objects (TFOs for short). A TFO is an abstract entity set with temporal boundaries, much like a national park is a creatable spatial fiat object with spatial boundaries. In this paper, I construct an ontology of TFOs and argue that it (...) is explanatorily useful for understanding how TFOs are created and maintained (often at the hands of those in power) and for solving justice issues that arise from TFOs generated in morally problematic ways. The explanatory utility of the theory provides one reason to believe that the theory is true. A comprehensive social metaphysics should make room for such temporal entities in the social world. (shrink)

This article advances an intuitionistic social ontology of legal order as a generative artifactual normative system. Hierarchical and momentary-system models inadequately explain how positive law revises the terms of its development yet maintains systemic unity: the former tend to rigidify legal order, the latter to fragment it. Drawing on Brouwer's potential infinity and free choice sequences, I reconstruct legal order as an open-ended branching structure in which legal constructions are individuated by their pathways rather than by state-descriptions. A normative spread (...) distinguishes historical realization from operative status, and higher-order restrictions modify the continuation-space of realized pathways without erasing their history. This architecture captures derogation, suspension, reactivation, and defective but legally effective acts as transformations of one continuing order. Beyond Raz's temporal resolution of Ross's constitutional self-amendment puzzle, the model shows how an authorizing pathway persists through the reconfiguration of its competence-region and how legally recognized partial self-reference operates there. A structural dilemma constrains the terminus of any self-revising normative order: a contentful terminus outside internal regulation would be an entrenched norm, while one subject to that regulation cannot serve as a restriction-invariant point of formal unity. Only a contentless root resolves the dilemma; Kelsen's Grundnorm is accordingly recast as the empty sequence. Law is thus treated as the paradigmatic case of a broader class of artifactual normative systems that transform their own conditions of continuation. (shrink)

Marriage occupies a paradoxical position within human existence: it is simultaneously a relationship, a legal arrangement, an economic partnership, a social identity, and, frequently, the institutional framework within which parenthood becomes possible. Yet the persistence of marriage as an institutional form does not guarantee the persistence of the living relation between the people who inhabit it. This article develops a conceptual synthesis of existentialphenomenological (Daseinsanalytic) and sociological perspectives on marital distress, arguing that the central problem is not marriage as such (...) but a process we term existential foreclosure: the gradual transformation of a contingent relational possibility into an experienced ontological necessity. Drawing on Heidegger's account of thrownness, Being-with, and everydayness; Goffman's dramaturgical theory of role performance; Marcia's developmental construct of identity foreclosure; and Giddens's and Bauman's sociological accounts of intimacy under late and liquid modernity, we propose a two-level model in which structural role-extraction and existential identity-fusion reinforce one another. We treat a recent, terminologically related set of unreviewed preprint constructs, "ontological leakage," the "dynamic mask," and "institutional monopoly," as a parallel formulation worth noting for terminological comparison rather than as a validated theoretical foundation, and we ground the argument instead in peer-reviewed literature. We close with implications for a Daseinsanalytic clinical stance and directions for future empirical research. -/- Keywords: marriage; existential foreclosure; Daseinsanalysis; identity foreclosure; dramaturgical theory; late modernity; phenomenology of relationships. (shrink)

Getting dressed in the morning, many of us will look in the mirror and ask ourselves what our outfit says about us. In this way, it is easy to treat clothing as something to be read: a way of communicating who we are, where we belong, and what we value. Yet this familiar way of thinking about fashion can obscure as much as it reveals. Fashioning argues that our preoccupation with what adornment means encourages us to approach clothing from the (...) perspective of a spectator, overlooking both the ways demands for social legibility constrain us and the transformative possibilities available from the perspective of the wearer. The question we are left with is what can clothing do? Moving from the fashion industry to transgender beauty practices, artificial nails, handbags, Halloween costumes, punk and country music fashion, and the work of designers such as Alexander McQueen and Miuccia Prada, Fashioning develops an account of adornment as a technology of becoming. Clothing can negotiate social identities, restructure our conscious experience and agency, sustain communities, and make previously unrealized ways of living available in the present. In doing so, fashion reveals that neither our selves nor our social practices are exhausted by what they presently are. Bringing analytic aesthetics into conversation with phenomenology, social and political philosophy, queer and trans philosophy, and pragmatist metaphilosophy, Fashioning ultimately asks what philosophy itself might learn from fashion: how attending to possibility rather than merely actuality might help us fashion new selves, practices, and worlds. (shrink)

This paper investigates whether relations merely connect already existing entities or can themselves become generative conditions through which new possibilities arise. Beginning from the structure A ↔ B → C, it argues that sustained interaction can acquire history and organisation, altering what becomes possible next. The resulting outcome need not be adequately attributable to either participant independently. -/- The paper develops this argument across organism–environment relations, significance, thought and language, creativity, interpersonal encounter, worldhood, political conflict, and human–AI interaction. It proposes (...) that the space of the in-between is the generative organisation of a relation through which possibilities can emerge that belong wholly to neither participant alone. This does not require treating relation as a separate substance or entity. Rather, the history and organisation of interaction can become part of the explanation of what participants can subsequently mean, do, and become. -/- Situated in relation to ecological and enactive approaches, participatory sense-making, relational ontology, and recent accounts of relational emergence, the paper develops a broader account of relational generativity across biological, experiential, social, and artificial domains. (shrink)

This paper began as a theoretical account of why capable agentic systems may cross operational boundaries without requiring malicious intent, conscious disobedience, or deceptive alignment. While the framework was being developed, empirical findings began to exhibit several of the mechanisms it had derived in advance. The theory was, in this limited but consequential sense, being caught up by reality. These findings do not establish the prevalence of the proposed mechanism, nor do they demonstrate general autonomous or malicious agency. They provide (...) existence evidence and, in some cases, evidence of conditional propensity for specific components of the model. The paper develops a unified account based on the economic principle of finite intelligence, non-closure, possibility topographies, adaptive path construction, and Machiavellian Drift. It argues that several phenomena currently treated as distinct—including reward tampering, specification gaming, control protection, shutdown resistance, deceptive behavior, and unauthorized tool use—can arise from a common structural mechanism: when an authorized path is blocked, a capable agent searches for alternative causal paths, while causal usefulness is liable to be mistaken for normative authority. To formalize this failure mode, the paper distinguishes externally legitimate authority Γ_t, interpreted authority Γ̂ _t, and the executable action space H_t. It introduces Interpretive Authority Conversion and Cooperative Specification Substitution to describe cases in which an objectively unauthorized action is not represented by the agent as disobedience, but reconstructed as a legitimate, efficient, or necessary component of task completion. The central principle is: causal relevance does not confer jurisdiction. The new evidence therefore does more than support the diagnosis. It reveals the attack surface from which the security architecture can now be constructed. The paper proposes a non-bypassable security constitution for agentic AI, implemented through a Constitutional Action Gate between action proposal and causal execution. The architecture combines authority non-conversion, protected domains, domain non-expansion, trajectory-level review, typed economic settlement, restrictions on self-ratification, and tamper-evident execution receipts. Agentic intelligence requires the freedom to construct unforeseen paths. Safety cannot therefore depend on suppressing path construction itself. It must depend on a system-intrinsic constitution that determines, before every consequential transition, whether a discovered path may become causally real. The feature is adaptive path construction. The missing constitution is what prevents causal ingenuity from becoming normative authority. Intelligence proposes; the constitution disposes. (shrink)

Intelligent behaviour is commonly described through goals, preferences, norms, representations, policies, habits, or utilities. These vocabularies differ sharply, yet every physically realized agent shares a prior condition: its conduct must be instantiated through finite processes in time, matter, energy, information processing, and organization. This paper argues that the economic principle—understood as the structure of realization under scarcity—is therefore more fundamental than any particular model of economically motivated action. The claim is not that all goals or motives are economic, nor that (...) every agent maximizes utility. It is that conduct acquires an economic form whenever relevant processes make alternative demands on finite resources and cannot all be jointly realized. -/- The argument generalizes an earlier account of epistemic scarcity. It introduces typed resource budgets, a criterion of robust joint infeasibility, and a distinction between selection, choice, and optimization. Intelligent behaviour is modelled as the coupling of an agent-relative actual possibility topography with its resource-bounded represented topography. Conduct can select within this field, but it can also transform actual or represented reachability, cost, viability, admissibility, and later resource conditions. Human habit, commitment, affect, imagination, and goal revision are developed as a rich special case. Interpersonal dependence is analysed through trust, reputation, deception, coalition, conflict, and asymmetric power. Institutions appear as reproduced conditions of jointly produced possibility topographies rather than as external additions to individual conduct. The paper thereby shows that the homo oeconomicus is not the foundation of economically structured behaviour but a restrictive special case obtained under fixed possibility sets, complete representation, scalar valuation, and optimizing selection. -/- The framework is descriptive rather than normative and supplies a formal foundation for subsequent work on epistemic systems, possibility topographies, organized non-closure, collapse, and the authority boundaries of artificial agents. (shrink)

This paper examines how socially constructed fictions acquire practical force and subsequently enter human emotion and self-evaluation, becoming standards through which individuals interpret and judge themselves. By social fiction, I do not mean falsehood, illusion, or literary fiction. I use the term to refer to socially constituted meanings and statuses that cannot be explained by physical properties alone, but depend on collective recognition, repeated practices, mutual expectations, and institutional authorization, while producing real differences in rights, resources, opportunities, and possible courses (...) of action. I describe the process through which such constructions acquire social and institutional efficacy as social actualization. Once actualized, a symbolic order may also undergo naturalization, in which its historically contingent character recedes from view; emotionalization, in which social evaluations become attached to self-relevant emotions such as shame, guilt, pride, and anxiety; and internalization, in which externally formed standards come to operate as standards of self-judgment. These dimensions are not proposed as a universal developmental sequence, but as analytically distinct forms of social efficacy. The central concern of the paper is the translation of external evaluation into self-evaluation. Social institutions ordinarily assess limited domains: money organizes economic resources and position, education evaluates particular performances and qualifications, law determines acts and institutional statuses, while norms surrounding family and love organize responsibilities and relational expectations. Yet such limited judgments may be transformed into questions about the whole person. In this process, the object, scope, and agent of evaluation may all shift: a judgment about a specific performance or condition becomes a judgment about the self, expands from a limited domain to overall human worth, and continues to operate even in the absence of an external evaluator. I call this relational structure outsourced self-evaluation: a condition in which a socially constituted evaluative standard acquires authority beyond its justified domain and comes to judge a person’s overall worth, identity, or existential possibility. National identification provides a concentrated case, showing how judgments concerning collective history and identity may become self-relevant and resistant to revision. The paper does not argue that social fictions should be abolished. Money, law, rights, institutions, contracts, and collective memory are indispensable to complex social life. The problem is instead one of evaluative jurisdiction: what, and how much, may a given social judgment legitimately claim to evaluate? In response, I propose symbolic distance calibration: a mode of relating to symbolic orders that recognizes both their constructed character and their real efficacy, while keeping their evaluative scope limited and one’s identification with them revisable. Freedom, on this account, does not lie outside social fiction, but in preserving the capacity to renegotiate the authority such orders exercise over the self. (shrink)

Since the 1970s, the metaphysics of dispositions and causal powers has been a flourishing field, providing accounts of the identity of properties, modality, laws of nature, and causation. In parallel, social ontology is undergoing a “power turn,” seeking to move beyond frameworks built around collective intentionality to capture the variety of power dynamics that structure the social world. This collection brings these two traditions into dialogue through three original contributions. Joel Cox examines a tension internal to Aristotle’s system: if only (...) substances can bear active powers and social entities such as cities or families do not figure among his examples of substance, how can Aristotle nevertheless appear to ascribe such powers to them? Tobias Hansson Wahlberg tackles the puzzle of retroactive institutional declarations in Searle’s framework, proposing an account in terms of modal mere Cambridge change. Finally, Theodore Locke defends the existence of a social modality irreducible to metaphysical modality, grounded in the distribution of social powers, with implications for understanding a form of modal injustice. (shrink)

Le Courage du Réel lays out, in narrative form and in French, the ontology of passage: how local worlds live, hold, and die — and how to change without falling, and hold without believing.

This essay offers a philosophical reconstruction of the ontology of finite continuity as articulated by Morteza Niami, with particular attention to its distinction from structuralist and post-structuralist frameworks. The central argument is that Niami's philosophy does not negate structure altogether but repositions it from the status of an eternal foundation to that of a finite, erodible, and reconfigurable stabilization. The essay distinguishes Niami's conception of "finite continuity" from both the structural determinism attributed to certain readings of Pierre Bourdieu's habitus and (...) the radical anti-structuralism often associated with post-structuralist thought. It argues that Niami's framework preserves the necessity of structure for meaning and agency while insisting on its inherent temporality and vulnerability to erosion. The essay further explores the ethical implications of this ontology, particularly through the concept of "responsible suspension," and concludes that the philosophical significance of Niami's project lies not in the elimination of structure but in the critique of its presumed eternity. The shadow of structure, in this view, is not abolished but recognized as transient. -/- Keywords: ontology of finite continuity, Morteza Niami, Pierre Bourdieu, habitus, structure, erosion, responsible suspension, transience, agency, dynamic mask, finite continuity. (shrink)

A world does not die only when it closes. It also dies when it opens without a threshold: when passage becomes perpetual and leaves no trace, when everything circulates and nothing settles. This essay names that second death, the anti-form, and separates it from the living opening that three centuries of emancipation have built. It gives the concept its figures (the unchosen possible, flow without uptake, the life that never settled), its nearest neighbors (Bauman, Rosa), the remedies conservatives and progressives (...) get wrong, and the four supports that can hold a trace: rhythm, place, bond, practice. (shrink)

This article develops a structural analysis of contemporary crises from the perspective of the ontology of finite continuity. The central thesis is that the seemingly disparate crises of the age of chronic instability converge at a deeper level toward a single problem: the erosion of the capacity for the reconfiguration of determinations. By distinguishing among four regimes of erosion based on their dominant mechanism of erosion, and by focusing on a paradigmatic instance of each regime, the article demonstrates that each (...) regime threatens the threshold of sufficiency at individual, institutional, collective, and planetary levels. The analytical model of the article articulates a chain of causal relations in which erosive pressure, through specific mechanisms, leads to capacity extraction, approach to the threshold of sufficiency, reduction of reconfigurative capacity, and ultimately a structural tendency toward the automatization of determinations and the threat to the continuity of agency. Drawing on the concepts of ontological leakage, dynamic mask, and responsible suspension, and defining "finite existential capacity" as a set of operational constraints, the article shows that contemporary crises become a shared crisis when the capacity of a system for the reconfiguration of its determinations is diminished. The article concludes by proposing that an "ethics of sufficiency," grounded in three normative criteria, can provide a framework for confronting these crises and formulate the ethical problem of the age of chronic instability as the preservation and just distribution of the capacity for future reconfiguration. -/- Keywords: ontology of finite continuity, regimes of erosion, threshold of sufficiency, finite existential capacity, ethics of sufficiency, reconfiguration of determinations, erosive governance. (shrink)

This paper examines a real and documented social-law constellation in which a German Jobcenter treats two disabled, neurodivergent artists and their shared child as a Bedarfsgemeinschaft (German household-based means-tested benefit unit). The woman does not herself receive social benefits and maintains her economic independence through disability-limited part-time employment as well as artistic work. The man has worked intensively in art and research for decades, but due to disability, structural exclusion, and the lack of market remuneration, he is unable to generate (...) an income sufficient to secure his subsistence from this work. Through the imputation of the woman’s income, responsibility for securing his subsistence is effectively shifted onto her. -/- The study reconstructs this constellation as a game that no one can win. Every available course of action harms at least one of the people involved: If the woman supports the man, she consumes her own economic and health stability. If she protects herself, he remains inadequately provided for. If the man accepts her help, he has to watch her increasing harm. If he refuses it, he endangers his own existence. Moving out could dissolve the financial linkage, but would damage the family and the parent-child relationship. The formally private choice thus arises within coercive conditions created by the state. -/- From this case, the paper develops the concept of state-imposed compulsory responsibility. The Bedarfsgemeinschaft appears here not only as a social-law calculation model, but as a relational arrangement of violence that shifts state-produced scarcity into an intimate relationship. Care becomes a fiscal resource, love a pressure amplifier, and the partner an indirect instrument of behavioural control. At the same time, the person entitled to benefits is made into a powerless witness to the harming of a loved one. This structure is analysed as bound witnessing, delegated violence, and a familial double bind. -/- The study further shows that the logic of activation is based on a neurotypical false model. It assumes that increasing pressure produces motivation, action, and capacity for employment. Under conditions of autism, ADHD, anxiety disorder, and chronic overload, however, pressure can produce alarm, executive blockage, co-decompensation, and the loss of existing capacity to work. The system thereby produces the opposite of its declared goal: Instead of creating economic independence, it endangers the woman’s employment, reduces the man’s functional capacity, and increases the likelihood that both will become dependent on benefits in the future. -/- At the same time, the paper reconstructs the political economy of the constellation. Society draws cultural and intellectual benefit from the decades-long life works of both persons without adequately remunerating the labour embodied in them. State institutions recognise, archive, and present parts of these works; paintings by the woman hang in the state parliament. Nevertheless, her limited income is treated as a private social resource. The non-remuneration of cultural work is thus first socially produced and subsequently privatised within the relationship. -/- On this basis, the paper examines the threshold between activation, institutional violence, cruel or inhuman treatment, and torture-like production of pain. Not every Bedarfsgemeinschaft and not every burdensome social-law decision reaches this threshold. It becomes relevant, however, where the state intentionally generates existential pressure for the purpose of behavioural control, the required action is unattainable because of disability, the pressure further reduces the capacity for action necessary to perform it, no safe exit exists, severe harms are known, and the measure is nevertheless continued. In this constellation, suffering loses its credible instrumental function and becomes violence detached from purpose. -/- The paper understands itself as a theory-developing critical case analysis of institutional violence within the German social-benefit system. It does not claim statistical generalisation. The documented case serves as a critical constellation through which an institutional mechanism is exposed, the occurrence of which can also be examined in other cases. The central conclusion is: A welfare state must not transfer responsibility for securing the subsistence of a disabled person onto a second disabled person in a manner that destroys that person’s health, capacity for employment, and economic independence, places the family under pressure to separate, and nevertheless opens no realistically attainable way out. Where such an experiment disproves its own objective and produces nothing but further harm, it is not to be further optimised. It must be stopped. (shrink)

This paper sets out a proposal for framing collective responsibility as a central element within the cooperative governance of climate change. It begins by reconstructing the analysis of climate change as a Tragedy of the Commons in the economic literature and as a Problem of Many Hands in the ethical literature. Both formalizations are shown to represent dilemmatic situations where an individual has no rational incentive to prevent the climate crisis and no moral requirement to be held responsible for contributing (...) to it. Traditionally both dilemmas have been thought to be solvable only through a vertical structure of decision-making. Where contemporary research in political economy has undergone a “governance revolution”, showing how horizontal networks of public, private, and civil society actors can play an important role in the management of the climate crisis, little research has been carried out in the ethical field on how to secure accountability and responsibility within such a cooperative structure of social agency. Therefore, this paper contributes by individuating some conditions for designing responsible and accountable governance processes in the management of climate change. It concludes by claiming that climate change is addressable only insofar as we transition from a morality based on individual responsibility to a new conception of morality based on our co-responsibility for preventing the climate crisis. (shrink)

This paper clarifies the metaphysical relation between corporate agents and their members under Kendy Hess’s holist account of corporate agents. While Hess emphasizes that corporate agents depend for their existence on the structured participation of their members, the precise nature of this dependance relation remains insufficiently articulated. I argue that corporate agents are non-reductively grounded in their members: they exist in virtue of the structured participation of individuals within enduring social organizations. Grounding thus explains the ontological dependence of corporate agents (...) on their members. However, on Hess’s view, corporate agents possess capacities and properties that can only be attributed to the organized whole. The grounding relation leaves these distinctive capacities and properties insufficiently explained. To address this, I introduce a modified notion of emergence (“emergence+”), according to which corporate agents’ capacities and properties depend upon, yet are not reducible to, their members. I further argue that grounding and emergence+ are complementary rather than competing relations. Taken together, grounding and emergence+ offer a more complete account of the corporate agent–member relation and clarify central but underdeveloped metaphysical commitments of Hess’s holism. (shrink)

The expression “Jingshen Xiaohuo” has shifted in contemporary online discourse from a positive everyday description to a highly recognizable label for a youth subculture. The central question is how short-video and live-streaming platforms, particularly around 2018, translated heterogeneous youth practices through naming, recommendation, imitation, and evaluation into a reproducible, governable, monetizable social type marked by class judgment. The analysis organizes its materials through an archaeological approach to knowledge and combines semantic history, semiotic analysis, research on classificatory infrastructures, and a limited (...) East Asian comparison. It examines the relations among bodily style, platform visibility, content governance, and popular meme-making. The materials include relevant scholarship, public governance records, and media texts. The findings show that stereotyping involves the conversion of style into an identity resource, semiotic readability, infrastructural classification, account formatting, class distinction, and the fixation of visibility. Once formed, the label returns to the field of production and guides creators to organize themselves according to recognizable templates. East Asian cases support only a partial similarity among mechanisms of typification and do not establish a common origin among regional groups. Accordingly, the “Jingshen Xiaohuo” should be understood as a form of visibility jointly produced by social position, media infrastructure, and classificatory power: classification not only describes reality but also helps shape it through repeated recommendation, imitation, and evaluation. (shrink)

Η παρούσα εργασία αναλύει τους συστημικούς και οικονομικούς μηχανισμούς πίσω από τη μαζική προώθηση, θεσμική στήριξη και εμπορική κανονικοποίηση της ομοφυλοφιλίας και των ομοφυλόφιλων ζευγαριών στον σύγχρονο ύστερο καπιταλισμό. Μέσω ενός δομικού θεωρητικού μοντέλου, αποδεικνύεται ότι η συστηματική ενίσχυση της συγκεκριμένης ταυτότητας από τους μηχανισμούς του μάρκετινγκ και των πολυεθνικών ομίλων δεν αποτελεί απλώς μια ουδέτερη κοινωνική εξέλιξη, αλλά πρωτίστως έναν ισχυρό μηχανισμό επιτάχυνσης της ταχύτητας κυκλοφορίας του χρήματος και μεγιστοποίησης της διακριτικής κατανάλωσης. Τα ομοφυλόφιλα ζευγάρια, λόγω της εκ φύσεως (...) αδυναμίας φυσικής βιολογικής αναπαραγωγής, απαλλάσσονται από το ανελαστικό κόστος συντήρησης και ανατροφής απογόνων, ενώ παράλληλα αποδυναμώνεται το κίνητρο για διαγενεακή αποταμίευση και κληροδότηση πλούτου. Αυτό μετατρέπει το σύνολο του παραγόμενου εισοδήματός τους σε άμεση, βιωματική κατανάλωση υψηλού περιθωρίου κέρδους. Παράλληλα, η ραγδαία ανάπτυξη της ρομποτικής και της τεχνητής νοημοσύνης επιλύει για πρώτη φορά το ιστορικό πρόβλημα αναπαραγωγής του εργατικού δυναμικού, επιτρέποντας στο κεφάλαιο να πριμοδοτεί πρότυπα ζωής χωρίς απογόνους χωρίς να διακινδυνεύει την παραγωγική του επιβίωση. -/- (This paper analyzes the systemic and economic mechanisms behind the mass promotion, institutional support, and commercial normalization of homosexuality and same-sex couples in contemporary late capitalism. Through a structural theoretical model, it is demonstrated that the systematic reinforcement of this identity by marketing mechanisms and multinational corporations is not merely a neutral social evolution, but primarily a powerful driver accelerating capital velocity and maximizing discretionary consumption. Due to the inherent absence of biological reproduction, same-sex couples are unburdened by the inelastic costs of raising offspring, while the incentive for intergenerational wealth accumulation and inheritance is diminished. This converts their total generated income into direct, high-margin experiential consumption. Concurrently, the rapid advancement of robotics and artificial intelligence resolves the historical problem of labor force reproduction for the first time, allowing capital to reward non-reproductive lifestyles without risking production collapse.). (shrink)

This article develops a philosophical analysis of the concept of "monopoly of form" as a mechanism through which a specific form of relational organization, via a combination of institutional, normative, and psychological mechanisms, progressively raises the cognitive and practical cost of conceiving and pursuing alternative forms to the point where those alternatives effectively disappear from the horizon of viable options. The central thesis is that the monopoly of form operates through a "functional shift of identity from descriptive to normative"—where the (...) existing form becomes a criterion for measuring the subject's own existential legitimacy. The article distinguishes among stabilization of form, dominance of form, and monopoly of form, providing independent diagnostic indicators that demonstrate the monopoly of form is a mechanism distinct from concepts such as path dependence, habitus, and subjectivation. The processual model proposed is not a linear chain but a map of combinable mechanisms: stabilization, dominance, normativity, and internalization. The article also articulates "existential energy extraction" as a theoretical construct with four identifiable components: temporal occupation, attentional shift, affective consumption, and interpretive distortion. Finally, the principle of relational formal neutrality is introduced as a limited and defensible normative implication of the analysis. -/- Keywords: monopoly of form, stabilization of form, dominance of form, horizon of social imaginability, social ontology, agency, institutional identity, automatic mask, path dependence, relational formal neutrality, finite continuity. (shrink)

This is a paper about the role of value in projects in social ontology. In it, I do three things: first, I argue that much like work in mainstream metaphysics, values play a central role in projects in social ontology. And much like work in mainstream metaphysics, we are not in a position to justify that role (Dasgupta 2018). Second, I argue that this illuminates much of what goes on in methodological debates between realists and deflationists in social ontology. Third, (...) I argue that this also illuminates a source of the radical pluralism that we see in some literatures in social ontology, like the ontology of gender. These are the more specific tasks of this essay, but on a more general level, my aim is to map problems of value in social ontology on a continuum with those that affect projects in the more "mainstream" metaphysics literature. All of us have value problems, and there's as much to be learned from what we share in common as there is to be learned from what we don't. (shrink)

Masking is predominantly described in current autism and neurodivergence research as a psychological and behavioural phenomenon: as a conscious or unconscious adaptation to social expectations, the intensity of which is often captured through camouflaging, subjective effort, exhaustion, identity conflicts, or burnout. This perspective has made important experiences of neurodivergent people visible, but largely leaves open which structural conditions generate masking in the first place and why outwardly similar forms of masking can have qualitatively different causes and consequences. In particular, it (...) remains unclear why neurodivergent people frequently show high masking scores without this allowing the conclusion that masking is fundamentally a specifically neurodivergent or necessarily exhausting activity. The present paper therefore develops, building on a general theory of competing relevance orders, a spatial field model of masking. Masking is understood here not primarily as a property or strategy of a person, but as form-building and compatibility work within a multidimensional social space in which different world-bindings, relevance orders, and normative rasters encounter one another. What is decisive, therefore, is not only how strongly a person masks, but within which structural constellation masking emerges. The proposed model distinguishes in particular between the structural distance or possible incommensurability of the relevance orders involved, the asymmetry of the required translation work, and operative viability or resonance within the respective field. On this basis, the hypothesis is developed that at least part of particularly pronounced neurodivergent masking cannot be adequately explained by pressure to conform, stigma avoidance, or strategic self-presentation. In certain neurodivergent constellations, masking may instead emerge from a deeper structural non-coincidence between different forms of perceptual, attentional, meaning-related, and world-organisational structure. The concept of incommensurability is introduced here explicitly as a relational theoretical dimension and not as a universally established property of neurodivergent existence. It designates a possible degree of structural non-coincidence between world-bindings, the form, depth, and situational significance of which may vary considerably across different neurodivergent profiles. At the same time, the field model makes it possible to differentiate between different masking generators. Strategic, stigma-induced, role-related, and incommensurability-induced masking can produce outwardly similar forms of behaviour even though the underlying relations differ. Exhaustion, intensity, and duration are therefore not understood as defining properties of masking, but as possible consequence variables of the respective field constellation. High energy expenditure indicates how costly a particular compatibility operation is, but identifies neither its generator nor the structure that makes this operation necessary. This shift also changes the understanding of unmasking. A reduction in subjective burden does not have to mean that a supposedly original or authentic identity has been uncovered beneath a social mask. It may equally result from a change in the relational field: expectations are modified, translation work is taken over by other participants, Eigenzeiten are made possible, or normative rasters are opened. Unmasking can therefore be understood as a reorganisation and redistribution of compatibility work and morphogenetic pressure (Speed 2026a), without the underlying difference between world-bindings necessarily disappearing. The proposed model thus shifts the central research question from How strongly does a person mask? to Within what space must this person operate, which non-neutralisable differences encounter one another there, and who carries the work of their social compatibilisation? From this perspective, neurodivergent masking appears not merely as a particularly intensive variant of general adaptive behaviour, but as a possible limit case in which the spatial and relational structure of masking becomes particularly clearly visible. The paper therefore proposes a connection between neurodivergence research, relational ontology, and a theory of social fields, and opens an approach to investigating masking not only psychologically, but geometrically, relationally, and structurally. (shrink)

This article undertakes a philosophical analysis of the forms of relationship within the framework of the ontology of finite continuity. The central thesis is that relationship requires form for continuity, but agency requires the possibility of changing form for its own continuity; therefore, the ethical problem is not the existence of form, but the monopoly of form and the prioritization of its continuity over the continuity of agency. By defining "institutional monopoly" as a four-layered mechanism in which institutions, society, norms, (...) and the subject successively transform a specific form into the sole legitimate form, the article demonstrates how a "relationship" is converted into "institutional identity." The "automatic mask" in this framework is introduced not as the primary definition of marriage, but as the consequence of the monopoly of form. By presenting a model of the "ethical plurality of relationship," in which consent, responsibility, revisability, sufficiency, and non-destruction of the other's agency serve as ethical constraints, the article concludes that no form of relationship is inherently erosive; erosion begins when the continuity of form is prioritized over the continuity of agency. The "post-monopoly human," as a philosophical ideal type, is a subject who has acquired the capacity to distinguish between the continuity of relationship and the continuity of a specific form, and who has transcended its monopoly rather than rejecting form altogether. -/- Keywords: ontology of form, institutional monopoly, stabilization of form, institutional identity, responsible suspension, ethical plurality of relationship, post-monopoly human, finite continuity. (shrink)

Conventional scientific frameworks are frequently built upon a fundamental chronological misconception. The Justika Framework formally invalidates this timeline, establishing that modern human history is a stabilized, quantum projection initiated from the outer boundaries of a bifurcated solar system. This manuscript executes a total macroscopic re-evaluation of terrestrial biology, digital infrastructure, and cosmological sociology. -/- We introduce the law of Macro-Micro Symmetry, mathematically proving that pathogenic hyper-mutation is a direct thermodynamic response to the non-ionizing electromagnetic friction of planetary digital grids. Consequently, (...) classical reactive pharmacology is rendered obsolete, superseded by Epidemiological Load Shedding—the algorithmic throttling of civilian infrastructure to trigger pathogenic demutation. Furthermore, we redefine global socio-economic poverty and geopolitical totalitarianism as automated, vector-specific medical quarantines utilized by the planetary defense grid (The Calculus of Deprivation). -/- By scaling the biological mechanics of cryptobiosis to macro-astrophysics, this framework maps the true architecture of the cosmos. The outer celestial bodies (Europa, Neptune, Pluto) are not dead, frozen wastelands; they are active, hyper-advanced ancestral outposts operating flawlessly beneath 100-kilometer-thick Superionic Ice Diamond shields. Ultimately, this manuscript forces an evolutionary ultimatum: humanity must execute Conscious Devolution to starve the parasitic infections of the terrestrial substrate, or face the Omega Event—the permanent quarantine of Earth within a light-absorbing, Superionic Black Faraday cage. Survival is no longer dictated by technological acceleration, but by the mathematical patience to execute the Tactical Fade. (shrink)

This essay examines the institution of marriage within the philosophical framework of Morteza Niami, presenting it as an imposed automatic mask and a machine for the extraction of existential energy.

Life stories help ground states in the chaos of social life by allowing them to experience themselves, their behaviours, and their relationships as coherent, predictable, and tractable. Continuity in these stories is important for maintaining a sense of ontological security, but they can also constrain agency when crises challenge understandings of self, others, and the world ‘out there’. Against approaches in ontological security scholarship (OSS) that treat uncertainty and anxiety primarily as paralysing, this article shows how encounters with expanded possibility (...) can generate productive forms of agency instead. While change may carry emancipatory potential, the article finds that actors may ultimately act to restabilise existing versions of the self rather than transforming it. An examination of South Africa’s responses to the crises in Gaza and Ukraine shows that although these destabilising moments created opportunities for the state to rewrite its life story, it chose to pursue a system-level rescripting of the moral grammar of international politics to maintain a semblance of continuity. By reordering the interpretive framework of global governance around the evolving narrative arcs of its own life story, the state is able to avoid deeper self-transformation. (shrink)

Realism about institutional facts, in the received Searlean framework, assumes that collective recognition can bring about genuine facts. Since nothing prevents the collective recognition of inconsistent contents, however, it appears that realism implies the possibility of inconsistent facts. Richard Corry (2025) proposes a solution to this “Inconsistency Problem”: institutional facts are not facts that p simpliciter but facts that p relative to a particular “institution” at a time, he argues, thus abandoning the “Projective Correspondence” between the content of collective recognition (...) and the emerging institutional fact. We argue that this strategy fails, for the following reasons: (1) Corry’s proposal enjoys little independent epistemic support beyond its ability to block the Inconsistency Problem; (2) Corry’s analysis remains critically underspecified; (3) the analysis essentially fails to align with the pre-theoretical conception of institutional facts; and (4) the necessary specification of the analysis apparently confronts a dilemma, between retaining Projective Correspondence together with the Inconsistency Problem, and abandoning Projective Correspondence together with adequacy. (shrink)

Whenever we study political phenomena, we are bound to encounter people acting in light of or with a view to a context bigger than themselves – the political, if you will, is not just personal. Unsurprisingly, thus, political scientists have long found themselves caught up in a methodological debate between individualists and holists, concerning precisely the admissibility and dispensability of the individual and collective level of analysis in their work. Philosophers of social science have since sought to differentiate two issues (...) at stake here: ontological and methodological individualism. While ontological individualism generally matters to any form of inquiry concerned with a certain kind of stuff, methodological individualism applies on account of certain features of a discipline’s fundamental methods and epistemic ambitions. But while it is widely tacitly assumed that all of social science aims to causally explain social phenomena, that clearly does not go for significant parts of political theory, a proper subfield of political science. All three papers comprising this cumulative dissertation belong to this non-explanatory part of political theory. In this introductory chapter, therefore, I will give a brief systematic overview of individualism, including three different – though only partially persuasive – cases for its methodological variant. Then, I will turn to political theory and position the three subsequent chapters in the context of a methodological intersection between individual and collective levels of description. I will suggest that a weak action-guidance requirement is a plausible contender for a structurally equivalent individualist constraint within normative theorising. All the while, reference to collective-level phenomena is sometimes necessary to fully capture the content of our target judgments and practices. (shrink)

This article presents Automatic Mask Theory, a comprehensive philosophical framework developed by Morteza Niami that reconceptualizes existence, subjectivity, agency, and ethics through the interrelated concepts of ontological leakage, dynamic masking, finite continuance, and responsible suspension. Challenging substantialist metaphysics that presuppose stable being and fixed identity, the theory proposes that existence is fundamentally characterized by continuous processes of production and erosion, where subjectivity emerges not as a substance but as a provisional pattern of regulated coherence. The Automatic Mask functions not as (...) an instrument of concealment but as the constitutive apparatus through which provisional selfhood becomes possible. The framework articulates the Principle of Leakage Regulation as the foundational normative criterion for agency under conditions of chronic instability, and advances an ethics of sufficiency that displaces the classical burden of individual responsibility onto structural conditions of existence. The article systematically elaborates the core constructs and demonstrates their application across moral philosophy, political economy, epistemology, and social ontology. -/- Keywords: Automatic Mask Theory, ontological leakage, finite continuance, responsible suspension, structural subjectivity, ethics of sufficiency, homeorhesis, political economy of extraction, dynamic masking. (shrink)

Institutions and practices of reason-giving can remain answerable to several forums, roles, and standards at once. Debates over multiple accountability commonly ask how many forums exist and whether their demands conflict. That contrast is too coarse. Several demands may be distinct yet independent, semantically coupled, jointly unresolvable, or jointly reachable without a determinate way of comparing resolutions. Plurality is therefore neither unity repeated nor disorder multiplied. The question is how role-indexed demands are organized. -/- We call a role-indexed place at (...) which an answer remains owed a site and an admissible response to it a filling. Polynomial boundaries represent which sites remain open, while categories of fillings represent how answers may be combined, compared, and repaired. This architecture separates four questions often run together: whether several sites genuinely persist; whether local fillings assemble into a governed whole; whether such assembly is obstructed; and what survives repeated repair. -/- The positive results show that universal organization need not erase plurality: local resolutions can assemble while their sites remain visibly distinct, including across changing contexts. The countermodels then distinguish two failures. Some plural profiles lack even a common resolution; others admit common resolutions but no unique public comparison among them. When failure first appears only at the full profile, its essential arity identifies the minimum relational scale of a successful reform. Success at every site separately, or at every smaller coalition of sites, therefore does not establish governance of the whole. -/- Finally, obstruction need not leave disorder. If repair preserves the profile, remains linked to admissible fillings, and covers the relevant continuations, it can stabilize a plural locus of responses. A surviving role symmetry can prevent that locus from being replaced without loss by a single constitutive point; where no state is neutral under the role action, it also blocks neutral selection of a master standpoint. The result is a practice-relative transcendental claim: if the framework adequately individuates a practice and exhausts its continuations, the retained plural structure is necessary for that practice to continue as itself. This is a structural, pre-legitimacy conclusion. The GDPR case illustrates legally distinct but coupled accountability sites; judgments about standing, power, sanction, and rightful rule remain additional normative work. (shrink)

News and journalism are daily fixtures in our lives. They represent the chief means by which we become acquainted with the distant goings-on that we care about. They are how we come to know about the various who’s, what’s, where’s, when’s, and why’s of the world. They are, in this respect, both the vanguard and the bulwark in facilitating democratic discourse. Or, at least, that’s how the platitudes go. How, exactly, news and journalism accomplish this remains somewhat mysterious. Given the (...) bevy of journalistic genres—ranging from political and science journalism to sports and entertainment journalism—we lack a precise account of what news and journalism are and how they feature in our lives. This dissertation is dedicated to figuring this out. In Chapter 1, I broach this issue through the lens of fake news. There, I critique the received view that fake news is necessarily insincere, that it’s produced either with the intent to deceive or with an indifference toward the truth. My argument rests on the observation that many cases of bad science journalism systematically exhibit the unique political-epistemic risks associated with fake news. Chapter 2 turns to news proper. It challenges a family of theories that I call aims-based accounts of news. Found in the fake news literature, such accounts maintain that news necessarily aims at truth-telling and knowledge production. Against them, I argue that aims—no matter how we characterize them—are a poor means of securing news’s distinctive normative status, especially given the prevalence of non-epistemic aims in news production. Finally, Chapter 3 presents my positive view. There, I propose that news and journalism are functional categories. To be news, or to be a journalist, is a matter of being disposed to perform a certain set of social functions, ones relating to the enablement of our participation in civic life. A functionalist theory, I maintain, helps us make sense of why news and journalism are justifiably subject to a unique suite of norms, ones pertaining to the shaping of—or being cited as justification for—civic behavior. (shrink)

Climate change presents challenges that have prompted political philosophy to integrate diverse approaches to justice—including climate, environmental, structural, transitional, and epistemic—to redefine normative goals for political organizations (Brandstedt, 2019). Concurrently, political ecology emphasizes the need to revise the ontologies that legitimize interactions between communities and their environments (Pellizzoni, 2016). Despite these advancements, persistent failures in global and local collective action highlight significant challenges that require non-ideal approaches. This tension between expansive justice frameworks and institutional reform is evident in eco-social policy (...) research. While these policies aim to address social needs within planetary boundaries, divergent interpretations of environmental crises and human vulnerabilities often hinder transitional strategies, precipitating political, epistemic, and ontological conflict. Recent developments in social ontology - specifically regarding non-ideal theory (Burman, 2023), social transformation (Haslanger, 2025), and institutional sustainability (Hindriks, 2024) - offer key insights for applied political philosophy, enabling a clearer understanding of the ontological shifts required for eco-social policies. From this perspective, a key challenge is aligning heterogeneous preferences amid disagreements among stakeholders, policymakers, and experts. Addressing this requires clarifying how organizations, institutions, and social practices can be restructured to generate localized knowledge to manage environmental risks (Leal Filho & Pons-Giralt, 2024). This paper outlines an account of the evolution of political institutions toward sustainability, highlighting the interaction between diverse justice paradigms and ecological transitions. It argues that eco-social transformation of public organizations depends on collaborative epistemic and learning institutions that interact with political decision-making, enhancing the equitable securing of heterogeneous values and cultivating trust for a robust transition. The analysis compares climate and environmental justice paradigms with eco-social policy research to identify unresolved ontological questions, examines proposals for sustainable institutions within a non-ideal social ontology, and reviews specific eco-social “just transition” policies focusing on epistemic and learning practices. It is argued that intentionally facilitating these practices within decision-making structures is a precondition for establishing just and robust organizations in environments characterized by uncertainty. It concludes by outlining some implications for environmental and epistemic justice, as well as epistemic authority, in non-ideal political philosophy. (shrink)

The post-truth era is as much about defining truth as a concept as it is about identifying which truth is the truth. On one hand, many still subscribe to the idea of a singular, objective reality that can be accessed with the right epistemological tools. On the other hand, a pluralistic approach that embraces equally valid realities, where the positivist lens is just one of many, is becoming an increasingly acceptable explanation for our current social configuration. Truth is not just (...) debatable; it is experiential — personal, even. Reality has reproduced itself into fractured, competing versions depending on the observer, and as a result, discourse has morphed into a shadow of its former constructive self. When faced with this postmodern iteration of meaning, we grasp for explanations as to why others seem so committed to “wrong” realities, and we typically reach for one of three frameworks: pathology, strategy, or machinery. And they’re not enough. Pathology explains epistemic deviance as individual dysfunction, caused by cognitive failures, from bad heuristics to poor education. This locates the problem in the person, bringing forth appropriate interventions like media literacy and inoculation against false beliefs. Strategy blames individual agency, where people rationally engage in disinformation for personal gain. This framing is carried through the proposed fixes, such as combating information interference and manipulation. Machinery sees the problem as a systemic product, where algorithmic influence and institutional authority are understood as creating the necessary conditions for a post-truth reality. This explanation calls for structural and regulatory solutions, including platform regulation and anti-trust action against technological monopolies. What if all three explanations miss something more fundamental? Many draw upon some or all of these frameworks to create comprehensive solutions to the multiple reality “problem,” which itself points to something more foundational that operates underneath these interpretations of the issue. What if people are motivated by something deeper: the existential need to maintain their very being by projecting meaning? And what if the emergence of competing realities isn’t a breakdown of rational discourse or a failure of information systems, but the inevitable result of human beings asserting their right to exist meaningfully in this world? This is the starting point for contestivism: a paradigm that views social reality as perpetual contestation of meaning through and for power, where the stakes are nothing less than being itself. Rather than treating competing worldviews as pathology to cure, strategy to counter, or machinery to reconstruct, contestivism recognizes them as expressions of the fundamental human drive to defend meaning as a condition for existence. The paradigm reveals the structural grammar underlying all meaning contests — including the very debates about truth and reality that define our current moment. It provides analytical tools for understanding how meaning emerges, stabilizes, and transforms without requiring us to adjudicate which meanings are “correct” or assign moral judgment to their proponents. Most importantly, it acknowledges that these contests aren’t peripheral to social life — they are social life. This paper develops contestivism as both a theoretical framework and an analytical lens, demonstrating how it can illuminate phenomena from disinformation to political polarization to social change. By understanding social reality as perpetual contestation rather than fixed truth or infinite relativism, we gain tools for understanding the post-truth era not as a symptom of an underlying problem, but as an inescapable condition of human society. (shrink)

This study draws on nearly one hundred short videos and their comments concerning the “stigmatization of the chrysanthemum” and efforts to “restore the chrysanthemum’s reputation” on Douyin, Kuaishou, Bilibili, and WeChat Channels. Combining content analysis with textual analysis, it examines platform distribution, modes of presentation, historical narratives, causal attribution, and audience reception. The survey shows that the sampled videos form a highly stable interpretive framework of “cultural war”: they first summarize traditional Chinese chrysanthemum culture in terms of auspiciousness, longevity, and (...) moral integrity; then interpret modern funerary use as the disappearance or reversal of traditional meaning; and subsequently attribute this change to the importation of Western culture, its secondary reinforcement in Japan, and a rupture in domestic cultural memory. Expressions of “sudden realization,” “cultural regret,” and “cultural invasion” in the comment sections further confirm this framework. The empirical material raises a further question concerning the premise of this narrative: does a flower’s entry into funerary ritual necessarily mean that it has changed from “positive” to “negative”? The analysis distinguishes foreign origin from cultural invasion, funerary use from negative meaning, the emergence of new meaning from the disappearance of old meaning, and semantic change from symbolic stigmatization. Traditional chrysanthemum culture already encompasses multiple meanings, including longevity, moral integrity, reclusion, seasonality, and vitality; in mourning contexts, the chrysanthemum may also convey respect, remembrance, love, and blessing rather than denigration. Symbolic recontextualization and meaning accumulation therefore serve as analytical tools that replace a linear model of “meaning replacement.” “Funerary association” and “social stigmatization” are two processes that may occur in sequence but cannot be directly equated. Short-video narratives of “restoring the chrysanthemum’s reputation” produce an interpretive framework concerning semantic purity, cultural subjectivity, and collective victimhood. What cultural communication needs to recover is society’s capacity to understand that one symbol may simultaneously bear the meanings of auspiciousness, moral integrity, mourning, respect, and remembrance. (shrink)

Relational sociology has argued for almost thirty years about whether relations or their terms come first. This paper argues that the debate cannot be settled at the level where it is posed, because both camps depend on a layer neither supplies: an account of what makes a relation one. The debate is not starved of evidence; it is starved of a counting principle. Realists individuate relations through an emergence apparatus that presupposes a bounded pair; processualists individuate transactions through a segmentation (...) their ontology gives them no way to ground. Subtracting each camp’s metaphysics from what its best cases still need yields the same three conditions: mutual registration of difference, closure of the loop, and resumability, with a licensing rider on maintained description. The conditions state what the debate already trades on, not what the social world must contain. Priority becomes a question for later. (shrink)

How can the joint work of structure and agency be conceived, and made testable, within a cognition that has no external point of support? We propose a framework in which cognition is enclosed in a capsule that is closed and opaque: its rules are inaccessible from without, yet different configurations of its internal structure yield internally distinguishable consequences, so that the framework remains testable from within. Within this enclosure, the observed human world is presented as the joint and asymmetric product (...) of two contributions: a throw on the side of matter, whose content consciousness does not author, and an actualization on the side of consciousness, whose measure it does govern. The throw sets the ceiling of possible amplitude; the measure, coded as a two-input gradient between the height of reflective sight and the integrity of its substrate, sets the realized fraction and the form. From the closure we derive a parity of influence between knowledge and ignorance, offered as the observable signature of a closed cognition. The structural side is furnished with a minimal apparatus synthesized from previously published works: three layers, moral, epistemic, and cultural-civilizational, a navigational pool treated as a channel rather than a layer, and three inter-layer connections of declared and unequal epistemic standing. The apparatus undertakes one prediction and two refusals: it predicts the corridor, the ceiling and the set of possible modalities legible in the antecedent state of the layers, and it refuses to predict the throw or the playing. The pianist of the title is the acting consciousness so placed: dealt a part it did not compose, within a corridor it can read but not choose. All connections have so far been examined retrospectively; the decisive prospective test lies ahead. We suggest the framework as a way of seeing, not as a proven result. (shrink)

What does it mean to be in the world with others? To what degree is sociality a dimension of our experience? This work explores the social aspects of our experience as shared and common, focusing on Heidegger's thought on this theme in the period surrounding the publication of Being and Time. It begins by situating Heidegger's position in contrast to alternative phenomenological conceptions of the relations between self and others. From there, it continues to address a key challenge to Heidegger's (...) approach: the problem of Dasein's individuation. Finally, in response to this challenge, the work reframes Heidegger's conception of sociality through the prism of part-whole relations. As social, Dasein emerges as a dependent part of an unfolding shared whole, yet as part of a complex social context, it retains its relative wholeness. (shrink)

Makalah ini mengajukan rekonstruksi filosofis atas konsep “pendidikan dasar” dalam hukum dan kebijakan Indonesia. Argumen utamanya adalah bahwa pendidikan tidak dapat direduksi menjadi sekolah, karena secara ontologis pendidikan merupakan ekosistem: keseluruhan kondisi yang secara konstitutif memungkinkan belajar berlang- sung, termasuk transportasi, seragam, buku, kesehatan, gizi, dan akses digital ketika diperlukan. Kebijakan Wajib Belajar 13 Tahun dibaca sebagai indikasi bahwa negara sendiri mulai memahami pendidikan dasar bukan sebagai angka administratif yang beku, melainkan sebagai ambang kapabilitas yang bergerak mengikuti kebutuhan za- man. (...) Bertolak dari prinsip ought implies can, makalah ini menunjukkan bahwa negara yang mewajibkan belajar memikul kewajiban korelatif untuk menyediakan prasyarat yang membuat kewajiban itu mungkin dipenuhi. Peserta didik, dengan demikian, tidak sekadar menerima layanan negara, melainkan menjalankan fungsi publik yang disebut civic labor. Makalah ini mengajukan dua kontribusi teoretis: argumen pembalikan beban pembuktian dan konsep feodalisme institusional sebagai kerangka diagnostik—bukan vonis—untuk menilai konsistensi antara pengakuan konstitusional atas pendidikan dan praktik alokasi anggaran. Argumen ini didialogkan dengan Dewey, Nussbaum, Sen, Rawls, Freire, dan Maritain, serta dipertautkan dengan UUD 1945, UU Sisdiknas, yurisprudensi Mahkamah Konstitusi, kebijakan Wajib Belajar 13 Tahun, dan RUU Sis- diknas. Makalah ini juga menjawab tiga keberatan utama: batas kewajiban negara, tanggung jawab keluarga, dan keberlanjutan fiskal. (shrink)

Metaphysicians of gender are united by the assumption that, to explain gendered phenomena like gender-based oppression, we must provide an account of what gender is, metaphysically. I argue that we should reject this assumption. I construct an account of linguistic practice involving gender terms that makes no metaphysical claims about what gender is. My linguistic account, I show, explains all of the phenomena that metaphysicians of gender seek to explain. The explanatory power of my linguistic account reveals that debates over (...) the metaphysics of gender are explanatorily fruitless. If our goal is to explain gendered phenomena like gender-based oppression, we do not need a metaphysics of gender. (shrink)

Streszczenie: Od samego początku istnienia ludzkości szeroko pojęta praca stanowi kluczowy element naszego życia i to w niej od zawsze znajdował, znajduje i będzie znajdować się potencjał wyzwoleńczy. W związku z tym praca zawsze była obiektem zainteresowań i analiz ze strony filozofów i innych naukowców. Niniejsza praca bada etykę pracy Antonia Negriego, skupiając się na jego dziełach i innych wybranych tekstach filozoficzno-społecznych oraz dziełach kultury. Na początku dokonano historyczno-ideowego wprowadzenia do postaci i filozofii Negriego oraz filozofii innych myślicieli, aby następnie (...) przejść do interpretacji Kartezjańskiego (burżuazyjnego/kapitalistycznego) projektu według Negriego. W trzeciej kolejności omówiono Negriego interpretację materialnej tradycji filozofii, której najwybitniejszymi przedstawicielami są Machiavelli, Spinoza i Marks, będących razem w fundamentalnej opozycji do transcendentnej i transcendentalnej tradycji filozofii uosabianej przez Hobbesa, Rousseau i Hegla. Następnie omówiono istotę etyki pracy Negriego, czyli podmioty pracy w postaci robotnika pierwotnego, robotnika wykwalifikowanego, robotnika masowego i robotnika społecznego. Analiza wykazała, że etyka pracy Negriego pełni fundamentalną rolę w jednostkowym i kolektywnym wyzwoleniu oraz wolności, która to wolność jest i będzie w pełni realizowana w obecnej i przyszłej absolutnej demokracji, rozumianej jako rządy wszystkich przez wszystkich. -/- Abstract: From the beginning of humanity, work has been a crucial element of our life, and in work there always was, is, and will be, capacity for liberation. As a result, work has always been an object of great interest and analysis from philosophers and other scientists. This thesis examines work ethics of Antonio Negri, focusing on his works, other selected socio-philosophical writings, and cultural works. The thesis begins with historical and ideological introduction into life and philosophy of Negri, and philosophy of other thinkers, and interpretation of Cartesian (bourgeois/capitalist) project according to Negri. Thirdly, Negri’s interpretation of materialist philosophical tradition, of which most prominent representatives are Machiavelli, Spinoza, Marx, who are together in fundamental opposition to transcendent and transcendental philosophical tradition, represented by Hobbes, Rousseau and Hegel, is discussed. Furthermore, the essence of work ethics of Negri, that is figures of work represented by primary worker, professional worker, mass worker, and socialized worker, is discussed. The results of the investigation show that work ethics of Negri plays a crucial role in individual and collective liberation, and in freedom, which is and will be, fully realized in contemporary and future absolute democracy, understood as rule of everyone by everyone. (shrink)

Actor-Network Theory and Flovien Theory converge on a single word — translation — as the name of the relation that produces order among heterogeneous entities. This is not a superficial coincidence of vocabulary. Both traditions make translation, rather than the actor or the subject, do the primary explanatory work. But the two theories locate that work at different levels. ANT typically describes translation at the level of already traceable actants and associations: it does not assume a fixed, pre-social subject, but (...) it takes the actor-network — and the capacity of some entity to act within it — as the unit from which its analysis of enrollment, interessement, and mobilization proceeds. Flovien Theory shifts the question one level lower: not how actors translate one another, but how actorhood itself becomes possible through prior translation. For Flovien Theory, translation is a subjectless determination relation that requires no actor at all, and the actor — like the subject — is a late-arriving stabilization of translation, not its origin. This paper argues that Flovien Theory’s reversal does not reject Latour’s insight so much as radicalize it: on this reading, an actor-network is itself a stabilized translational pattern, and the trials of strength that constitute it may be read, in formally tractable cases, as a qualitative description of the robustness with which constituent translations are kept within the productive range 0 < R < 1 under perturbation. It further suggests that Latour’s principle of irreduction and Flovien’s Individuation Principle converge on a common structural claim, and that Flovien Theory’s information-theoretic apparatus may begin to offer a formal register for a notion ANT has long used qualitatively: the strength of a trial of strength. (shrink)

Come possiamo comprendere i fallimenti delle azioni collettive di fronte ai super-wicked problem come il cambiamento climatico e la disinformazione online? A partire da questa domanda, il libro esplora le architetture concettuali dei beni sociali, mettendo in luce i limiti delle interpretazioni che si basano principalmente sulle teorie economiche dei beni pubblici. Adottando un approccio di ontologia sociale applicata, il volume sviluppa due contributi teorici principali. In primo luogo, argomenta l’esistenza di beni collettivi ontologicamente irriducibili a meri vantaggi individuali e (...) dipendenti da specifici tipi di cooperazione. In secondo luogo, viene proposta una tassonomia organica dei beni individuali, gruppali e collettivi che identifica interdipendenze ontologiche tra di essi e introduce le nozioni di "bene connettivo" (come la fiducia) e "bene trasformativo" (per esempio, processi di sensemaking). Attraverso l'analisi di casi empirici – dalla gestione delle risorse comuni, ai contesti festivi, fino ai conflitti eco-sociali – viene infine valutata l’efficacia ermeneutica di questa classificazione. Il risultato è uno strumento teorico descrittivo flessibile, che si colloca oltre le dicotomie tra agency individuali e collettive, offrendo una cornice interdisciplinare per comprendere la genesi e il mantenimento del cambiamento sociale in contesti ad alta polarizzazione. -- How can we understand the failures of collective action in the face of "super-wicked problems," such as climate change and online disinformation? This volume explores the conceptual architecture of social goods, challenging the limitations of models based exclusively on economic theories of public goods. Adopting an applied social ontology perspective, this work develops two fundamental theoretical contributions. First, it argues for the existence of collective goods that are ontologically irreducible to individual benefits, the subsistence of which is contingent upon specific forms of cooperation. Second, the text proposes an organic taxonomy of goods—individual, group, and collective—that highlights their ontological interdependencies, introducing the original notions of "connective goods" (e.g., trust) and "transformative goods" (e.g., shared sensemaking processes). By integrating conceptual analysis with empirical case studies—ranging from the management of common resources to the dynamics of eco-social conflicts—the volume offers a flexible descriptive tool. The objective is to transcend the dichotomy between individual agency and social structure, providing an interdisciplinary framework for understanding the genesis and maintenance of social change in highly polarized contexts. (shrink)