Writing social reality into the book of the world

Abstract

This thesis has four chapters which, together, offer a non-exhaustive but still quite extensive account of social reality. In Chapter 1, I defend an analysis of the notion of sociality which has it that to be social is to somehow involves cooperation. In Chapter 2, I present and defend an account of cooperation which roughly claims that cooperation occurs when people pursue a goal they have in common, according to a plan they share, and in a state of mutual awareness. In Chapter 3, I put forward an account of a particular kind of social phenomena: institutions. I draw on the work of Searle, Hindriks and Thomasson and argue, very roughly, that institutions are created by people who cooperate in a way that commits them to certain rules, which they have the power to enforce. Finally, in Chapter 4, I argue that circular accounts of social phenomena can be illuminating and, in particular, that they can help vindicating reductive identifications of the phenomena they target, even though they fail to provide reductive identifications of the notions they aim to analyze.