Dr Naomi Thompson University of Bristol

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Social Construction as Social Metaphysical Explanation

Recent works by Jonathan Schaffer and Aaron Griffith have offered accounts of social construction as grounding. In this paper, I argue that better suited for modelling social construction is metaphysical explanation, and further that this sort of metaphysical explanation should be taken to have various non-standard features. In particular, my account of social construction as social metaphysical explanation takes social metaphysical explanations to be context sensitive, holistic (and thus nonsymmetric), and non-factive. Driving this account is my contention that social construction requires that the concept the referent of which is to be constructed be salient in the context.