Social Construction, Grounding, and Interventionism

Grounding is often used to formulate accounts of social construction. But as I argue, given standard grounding principles, ground-theoretic accounts of social construction conflict with empirical models studied in special sciences like feminist sociology, economics, psychology, and more. The conflict arises because many such models posit circular cases of social construction: these are cases in which one fact both socially constructs, and is socially constructed by, another fact. Ground-theoretic accounts of social construction imply that there are no circles like these. Therefore, I conclude, those ground-theoretic accounts should be rejected. In their place, I propose an alternative account of social construction---based on interventionist approaches to causal and non-causal explanation---which allows for social construction in a circle.

Isaac Wilhelm is an assistant professor at the National University of Singapore who works on metaphysics, philosophy of science, and philosophy of physics. Along with numerous articles, Isaac has written an introductory logic textbook called “Logic for Justice,” published with Routledge in 2023.