Received: 15 August 2022 Accepted: 17 March 2023 DOI: 10.1111/phil.12334 ORIGINAL ARTICLE Toward a critical social ontology Michael J. Thompson Department of Political Science, William Paterson University, Wayne, New Jersey, USA Correspondence Michael J. Thompson, Department of Political Science, William Paterson University, Wayne, NJ, USA. Email: thompsonmi@wpunj.edu 1 | Abstract I argue in this paper for a critical social ontology, or an approach to theorizing social reality and social institutions that is more than descriptive of social reality, but is also able to provide practical reasoning with an ontological dimension for judgment. At the heart of this idea is a different take on social metaphysics from most standard current accounts in that it begins with empirical, phylogenetic capacities of human beings for social practices (realizing abstract thought in the world) as well as relationality (the need for attachments to others). The combination of these two essential human capacities, what I call the practical-relational nexus, is generative of more complex social reality. The ontogeny of any social reality is the result of the ways that this practical-relational nexus has been organized and shaped by external social structures and systems, themselves the product of certain kinds of social power. I then explore the metaphysics of social power before considering the ways that this approach to social metaphysics can inform practical reasoning with the capacity for social and political criticism. INTRODUCTION Current approaches to the metaphysics of social forms have largely been concerned with what we can refer to as a cognitive, constructivist approach to the reality of social entities. By this, I mean that social facts and social entities are largely, if not entirely, dependent on the linguistic, cognitive, or recognitive features of human intentionality. Social reality is, in this respect, produced from our minds and our attitudes about the world and this means understanding social reality is a project of understanding these properties of human intentionality in collective or coordinative terms. While agreeing with the cognitive aspect of this philosophical approach, I want to emphasize the ways that social entities themselves possess ontological attributes, that the building blocks of social entities and Philos Forum. 2023;54:61–78. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/phil © 2023 Wiley Periodicals LLC. 61 62 THOMPSON institutions are generated not solely from our minds, but from a fuller account of our phylogenetic capacities and features. The position I take is that a metaphysics of the social needs to be rooted in our actual capacities for both realizing ends and purposes in the world as well as for our inherent capacity for relatedness with others. To be a social being in a distinctively human sense is to be a being who can realize conscious ends in the external world as well as to have the capacity for relatedness to others—a relatedness that is essentially based in our needs and capacity to cooperate and collaborate with others. Since these capacities are rooted within us, they are phylogenetic in that they can be shaped and formed by forms of socialization into ontogenetic capacities. The former indicate species-specific capacities and the latter the ways these have been organized and shaped by social institutions and processes that socialize us. What makes us distinctively human as social beings is the nexus of these two capacities as relational and practical beings; in other words, the ways that these two phylogenetic capacities interact with the other to forge the basis of social reality. Although intentionality is clearly one phylogenetic feature of human beings, so too are our relations with others and, therefore, our capacity to form relations and to act out our intentions via our practical relations with others and the world as a whole. This means thinking about social entities as organizational shapes of these properties and not merely as collective forms of intentionality. Rather, a metaphysics of the social world should be built around the mutually interdependent structure of these dual capacities, what I will call the practical-relational nexus that is phylogenetically unique to us as humans but is generative of different social worlds—of different social ontologies. Put another way, our social ontology is the product of the ways that this practical-relational nexus generates richer and more diverse forms of association, systemic relatedness, and collective ends and projects. I propose that this is the basis for a critical social ontology in that it can grant us a coherent grasp of macro social entities. Critical social ontology seeks to unmask the basic properties of social reality to gain a deeper understanding of the ways that our social world manifests forms of domination or oppression as opposed to more freedom-enhancing forms of life. In light of a recent turn in theories of judgment that seek to ground our practical reason in some metaphysical commitments (Steinberger, 2022; Thompson, 2020), a critical social ontology is premised on the notion that we can articulate metaphysical categories that underwrite the generation of our social world. As I see it, the current approaches to social metaphysics that are dominant—such as theories of collective intentionality or of social recognition (see Ikäheimo, 2019; Ikäheimo & Laitinen, 2011)—are themselves dependent on a deeper set of categories that are constitutive of human sociality and ways of understanding the ontology of social facts and social artifacts. By terming this a fundamental social metaphysics, I mean to convey that it is conceptually prior to theories of social reality that place emphasis on collective intentionality or some other form of constructivist argument. Such theories of social ontology are rooted in linguistic and cognitive capacities of individuals and, in this sense, cannot explain how such capacities are shaped and formed. In this sense, it is an alternative theory of social ontology from what Francesco Guala has called the “Standard Model of Social Ontology” (Guala, 2007). This involves seeing social reality as rooted not merely in our cognitive capacities, but seeing that these cognitive capacities themselves depend on prior human capacities for both practical and affiliative behaviors—behaviors that are rooted in our species-specific capacities for human social life. In this sense, what I am calling a “fundamental social metaphysics” is a kind of materialist theory of social ontology in that it provides us with the conceptual building blocks for understanding human society as rooted in our phylogenetic capacities and not merely the already-socialized capacities of individuals within a community. It is not at all clear to me, for example, that following a norm, or assigning a status function, or participating in a we-thinking form of collective intentionality would be possible without theorizing some prior capacities for practical-relationality itself. TOWARD A CRITICAL SOCIAL ONTOLOGY 63 In this sense, the ontology of social entities such as institutions and other coordinated forms of social activity can be understood as essentially constituted by the different shapes that this practical-relational nexus takes in any given time in the world. But this itself is also determined by the ways that social power, itself an important concern of social ontology, is distributed and the ways it can shape the social forms of relatedness and purposive action that we perform. Social power has an ontological status in that it is the efficient cause of our forms of social life: what ends and purposes organize our collective lives, what norms govern our relation with others, and so on, are not arbitrary: they take the form they do as a result of the forms of power that are used to make them cohere. This power can morph into different forms as well, say, into domination as when our social forms are organized to exploit or otherwise exercise power in such a way that it benefits one sub-set of the community at the expense of, or in some way extracts surplus benefit from, the whole. Power, from this perspective, can now be seen as the basic capacity for agents to shape, maintain, and enact the fundamental norms, practices, relations, and purposes that are generative of their social world. The more that this power is equally distributed, the more collaborative our cooperative relations with one another become. Workers tend to be unable to determine the purposes, relations, or processes of the corporation for which they labor since private ownership of capital grants this power to those who control it. This entails a domination by those with the power to shape the institution and those dominated lack the power to shape that part of their social world. The less equally distributed, the more power is captured by a subset of the community, the more that subset has the capacity to shape and alter our practices, relations, systems, and ends toward their own plans and projects. This becomes a phenomenon of domination rather than mere social power per se. For practices to be social, they must be organized in some relational sense. Our relations with others is a primary element in what kind of social reality is generated. This is where the concepts of power and change become essential as ideas in social metaphysics. Social power is the capacity that an agent (corporate or individual) possesses that enables it to shape the organizational dimensions of social relations as well as the practices that are enacted. Viewed in this way, power is a core aspect of social ontology in that it is determinative of the shapes of our social-relational forms of life as well as the processes and dynamics that animate any given social reality. I will also make the case that social power is the efficient cause of the particular kinds of social reality that any human community articulates since it is in how social power is distributed and employed that is determinative of our social reality. As the distributive structure of social power shifts, so too does the shape of the social world itself and, ipso facto, the nature of individuals themselves. My thrust in this paper is to suggest that this take on social metaphysics can illuminate not only debates in social science, but also demonstrate how social ontology can be taken up by practical concerns. A social ontology that is critical is one that is able to grasp the fundamental categories of social being—of institutions, practices, relations, and so on—but from a rational point of view. That is, such categories should allow us to become rationally aware of the frameworks that undergird our social world by granting us the ability to become self-conscious of the ways that the practical-relational nexus is at the heart of our social reality and forms of life. A critical social ontology gives us access to a coherent grasp of social reality in order for it to become a concern for practical affairs. Beyond an ontology that explores the tacit knowledge of our social world, we can have a critical grasp of it via metaphysical categories that grant us a holistic access to social reality and, thereby, to subject it to judgment, to evaluative criticism, to the possibility of mutative change. The concept of power is a crucial dimension in shaping our social world since it can be distributed in different ways and affects and shapes the practical-relational world that is constitutive of my social being as well as the purposes and ends toward which our collective, cooperative efforts are organized. The social-metaphysical categories I will elaborate can therefore be used for social criticism and evaluation. The idea of what kinds 64 THOMPSON of relations, practices, and ends might be considered “good,” or worthy of our deontic commitments is a crucial question toward which social ontology can make fruitful contributions. 2 | TOWARD A FUNDAMENTAL METAPHYSICS OF SOCIAL FORMS What I would like to do first is elaborate some fundamental metaphysical categories that allow us to grasp rationally and critically our social ontology. The ontological status of the social forms and social entities that form our social world such as institutions can be fruitfully approached by breaking down what I will call here the fundamental metaphysics of social forms or those features that constitute the basic capacities and properties of human beings as social beings. These properties I see as essentially phylogenetic to the species and they constitute the basic structure for generating different kinds of social reality. Phylogenesis describes those capacities inherent within the individual; they are immanent but also nascent in that they are developed and cultivated by forms of socialization. The particular ways that these capacities are developed give rise to ontogenetic capacities which are the actual ways that these capacities manifest themselves via those given socialization processes. The social world, in this sense, is not merely grounded in our linguistic and mental capacities to generate social facts via constitutive rules and collective intentionality (Epstein, 2006; Searle, 1995, 2010), but is more fundamentally made possible by the features of our sociality more specifically. This means that the layered structure of social reality is rooted in the dynamics of social practices themselves as well as the constituent parts that make up practices and their formation into social structures and processes. As I see it, these different dimensions of social ontology should be viewed as moments within the social whole; that is, they are to be understood as reciprocally related to one another in a dynamic rather than static sense. Contemporary approaches to social ontology largely work within a cognitivist, linguistic, and constructivist framework where social facts are viewed as being constructed out of collective forms of intentionality and the general acceptance of certain norms or rules of assigning functions to objects or group practices. In this sense, norms are the central vehicle for grasping how social reality is formed and sustained. As Brian Epstein notes, “the social world is a kind of projection of our thoughts, or attitudes, onto the world. We, as a community, make the social world by thinking of it in a particular way” (Epstein, 2015, p. 50). This very statement, however, reveals a curious aporia in the predominant way that we are thinking about social metaphysics. The very fact that “[w]e, as a community, make the social world” is itself question begging: how can a community already create the social world given that a community is, in some basic and prior sense, social itself? Are social facts expressions of socialized beings or entities? A community is without question a social entity; it constitutes an ontology, a form of being. But if that is the case, then how can it be made from the community's own collective intentionality or thought projections? But at another level, it seems wrong to attribute our social reality to thought projections or our shared attitudes about the world. Although I do believe this is a crucial dimension of human social reality, there nevertheless remains a prior level of sociality that underwrites such activities. Our sociality is a systemic structure of patterned practices and relations that are oriented and organized toward realizing some end or purpose in the world. This forms what we can see as a proto-metaphysic of the social in that it is what lies conceptually (although perhaps not temporally) prior to our cognitive, attitudinal, and collective-intentional activities of mind. The attitudes we project to coordinate our social activities are certainly crucial: but they act to shape, create, and/or sustain this fundamental social ontology. These patterned system of relations, practices, norms, and purposes persist through time as institutions and have causal power over the ontogenesis of subsequent members of the community. As TOWARD A CRITICAL SOCIAL ONTOLOGY 65 such, the phylogenetic practical-relational nexus can be seen to generate different forms of social reality (a social ontology) based on the ways it is shaped and the kinds of social power that it engenders. This problem seems to me to require a different approach to our understanding of the social as possessing its own ontology. The reason for this begins with understanding that the capacities inherent within any individual mind require the presence of relations to others for their ontogenetic development. Cognitivist approaches to the social world restrict themselves to a single mind's capacity to assign a status function or follow a norm, and so on. But these capacities themselves are the result of taking in the relational dynamics we have with others. To think as a social being means to be able to move in a shared space of norms and concepts that organize our own individual cognition and subjectivity. The we-ness that I move within is internalized as a capacity of thinking about the object world. As a result, the social is generated by this innate capacity for cooperative, normative activities that seek to realize or achieve some end or purpose—in short, social practices. I think that cognitivist approaches essentially pass over the very question of what aspects of social forms enable and develop the ontogenetic capacities for collective intentionality, for joint action, and so on. To ignore such an important question is to commit ourselves to a view of human sociality that is comprised of individuals that have already been socialized and then enter into or create institutions without a theory of how or what the social actually is. On my account, a fundamental social ontology can be constructed out of a series of dialectically related concepts that are constitutive of sociality itself. What makes human social reality distinct from other forms of non-human collectivities is the capacity to shape and re-shape these fundamental ontological properties of our social being. To be social is to be a practical, relational being capable of positing ends and purposes in the world. It may be that non-human animals also possess such capacities, but what marks human social reality off from non-human capacities is that we are able to be self-conscious of these capacities and to subject them to judgment and to mutative change. Most crucially, the view I take here is that social reality is more than a projection of our thoughts, attitudes, or norms. It is more than this in the same way that a Aristotle claims a house is more than the forms of matter (ὕλη)—the bricks, wood, mortar, and so on—that constitute it physically, or the ways that a radio is more than a collection of metallic and plastic components. The social ontology of these objects rests in the ways that they are not merely objects to which we assign status functions, but that they fulfill the express ends or purposes of distinctly human activities and practices. Indeed, in the same way, marriages, universities, markets, families are all more than a mere collection of specific norms: they should be understood as manifesting a shape or structure of practices, relations, and purposes that are distinctive to them as social facts or social forms. The norms that underwrite these social forms and institutions are generated and sustained by norm-governed practices, practices that, in turn, generate specific relational structures and dynamics as well as realize ends and purposes in the world. In this sense, they should be seen as distinct forms of social reality: as patterns of relations and practices that realize ends and purposes in the world. In this sense, we can see that institutions are patterned practices that take on structural form in that they are reified and sustained over time. They therefore take on a more objective ontological status in that they can be sustained by different participants over time. As I see it, this is where we can begin to glimpse the possibility for a more robust theory of social metaphysics emerging: by grasping the idea that the social itself is essentially composed of certain phylogenetic capacities of human beings for practical relationality that itself is capable of generating norms and more elaborate patterns of social reality. The capacity for language and for thought and our development into becoming language-users and thinking beings is itself dependent on our capacities for forming relations with others; relations that will develop our ontogeny as language-users capable of collective forms of intentionality; and so on. In essence, there must be some proto-social metaphysics that makes collective intentionality and all it can explain, possible in the first place. 66 2.1 THOMPSON | Social practices We can begin by examining social practices as a core feature of the generative theory of social ontology and as a basic feature of social entities. The reason for this is that it is a core phylogenetic feature of human beings in that each has the capacity for being a practical being. Practices can be seen as distinctive forms of action in that they are teleological in nature: that is, they aim at some end or purpose. The capacity to act as a practical being is a phylogenetic capacity of human beings that can be shaped, developed, and organized in specific ways creating the basis for the ontogenetic manifestation of social being itself. A social practice is defined here as an activity that seeks to realize some end or purpose of which the social agent is capable of being aware or of positing. I take this basic idea from Aristotle's notion that “Thought (διάνοια) by itself moves nothing, but only thought directed toward an end and which is practical (ἕνεκά του καί πρακτική) . . . . [F]or the one who makes something always has some further end in view; the act of making is not an end in itself, it is only a means and belongs to something else. But a thing done (τὸ πρακτόν) is an end in itself” (Aristotle, 1968, p. 1139b-1). Aristotle's idea here is that practices are distinctive in that they realize thought in the world. They realize thought in the sense that what makes an action a practice is that it has an end in view, an end that thought seeks to make real or actual in the world. That is to say, practices, as opposed to mere actions, seek to intentionally realize an end, to translate abstract ideas into concrete reality. As such, practices are inherently teleological in that they are structured by some end: an end retrogressively can be seen to determine or in some sense organize the means used to realize it. The thesis that a practice is a kind of activity that contains in end (τέλος) is significant for understanding the nature of social practices because they are marked off from mere actions—such as coughing, scratching, or some other primitive behavior—by the fact that they are enacted for the purpose of realizing an end in the world. To be sure, humans, like other non-human animals, can intend to scratch or cough; but these are not distinctively social in a human sense. The capacity to create and choose to realize a conceptualized end is, and when this is normalized into a practice to be shared with others, it becomes a fragment of social reality. Social practices are therefore norm-governed in the sense that norms shape the action into a practice as opposed to a mere act of some kind. But practices also create the very norms that allow them to be communicable and shareable, that is, social (see Wallace, 2009). To fashion a spear from a tree branch becomes a practice in a social sense when it takes on a certain normative weight: when one and show another to fashion the branch in specific ways to realize the spear and transform its ontological status from a brute natural object to one with purpose and meaning. Practices are therefore more than norms in the sense that they seek to realize ends and, in this sense, are crucial to understanding how the social world is generated and sustained. Human beings possess the ability for praxis as a phylogenetic capacity, but it becomes a generator for social reality when it is paired with our capacity for relatedness: for interacting with another through some kind of attachment or cooperative behavior. This forms the practical-relational nexus that serves as a means by which we can form collective forms of life that pattern practices and relations to realize ends in the world. What makes a practice social is that this capacity for thought to realize itself through action becomes normative and thereby shareable with others. I learn how to create language, spears, be a student, or a chef via the internalization of norms that shape a given practice. It is possible that a non-socialized human being could take a branch and fashion a crude spear for hunting an animal for food. This would not be a social practice, to be sure. But our relations with others and the socialization of our capacity for praxis serve as the basis for a more complex social ontology. To speak a language, which requires a phylogenetic capacity for linguistic competence, also requires that there are others with whom you can communicate as well as others to teach you how to speak the language, and that this communication can be used to realize more sophisticated ends in the world. TOWARD A CRITICAL SOCIAL ONTOLOGY 67 Social practices in general follow this basic schema: they are rooted in individual phylogenetic capacities, but they require relations with others for them to be worked up into more sophisticated form. Practices are always in some basic sense social: even when I perform a private act, like writing a diary, I am drawing on ontogenetic capacities that have been developed by my relational world. My capacity to write, to self-reflect, to use language to make meaning—of these are not possible external to a relational world within which I participate and from which I develop and internalize certain ontogenetic capacities. Practices are therefore dialectically related to my relations in that they make them possible and in that they can, in turn, shape those relations as well. This is why I refer to the practical-relational nexus as an essential nucleus for generating social reality, for neither practices nor relations can be seen as being prior to the other. To do so would require us to posit an initially non-social form of being, which itself does not exist. 2.2 | Relations and structures Since these practices are social, they necessitate a relational account of how they are developed, learned, and employed. The social world is inherently made up of relations. Our relations to others are themselves the products of norms that we follow that link me with another. But even here, we can see that the relation is, in some basic way, prior to the norms themselves. Children from infancy must be inculcated with the norms requisite for becoming a social being by caregivers. In this sense, the relation of the caregiver (a mother or father, for instance) to the infant is one of an attachment in that the bond between them is one of necessity. The infant needs nourishment and looks for the attention of the caregiver for other basic physical and psychic needs. This attachment is the basic building block for fuller social relations in that it is the most basic phylogenetic capacity to relate to another. The attachment of the caregiver and the infant precedes the infant's absorption of the norms and practices that, once learned successfully, will enable the attachment to become a full-fledged relation and then, in time, as a primer for relations to others as well. The idea here is that there is a proto-normative capacity for relating that is developed via norms and practices into more complex and thicker relations. Children become children in a social-ontological (as opposed to biological) sense when they have been able to follow the norms and enact the practices associated with children within a given familial structure. These patterns of practices over time therefore generate relational structures that themselves have formative powers over the ways that individuals within them function and develop. Families can take on many different forms, but whichever form they take—such as the predominant form in Western cultures of the nuclear family—is ultimately generated by the patterns of practices that enact and organize our relations with others. These relations become structures in that they possess a normative ontological reality toward which the roles of individuals are oriented. A social structure is therefore a regularized pattern of practices that are enacted by specific normative relations. These structures achieve an ontological independence from the specific members that enact them in the sense that they persist through time as institutions. Social structures are constitutive of institutions in that they are formed by specific patterns of relating. These patterns of relating are themselves constituted by specific practices and norms that are regularized over time. In this sense, social structures are relations that have a more enduring character than a mere relation. Indeed, just as a pattern of practices constitute a social relation—friendship, for instance, is generated by certain attitudes, affects, norms, and practices directed at another—so too do social structures exist as patterned practices and norms that possess the ability to shape and alter the ways we relate and act in the world. To be a friend with someone as opposed to being married to them is 68 THOMPSON an ontological difference of the relational structure between two people not only as a mental projection of each member of the structure, but also in the sense that a friendship and a marriage possess certain normative expectations about how we act and behave as a result of being within that relational structure. The relational structures that make up the institution of friendship or marriage are therefore ontologically distinct not only because each member of the relatum project different sets of attitudes on each other, but in the sense that each becomes aware that the nature of each structure is organized for a different purpose, a different end. We are, in some basic sense, married to another for a different purpose than the reasons we are friends with someone. In this sense, institutions, like the practices that constitute them, have purposes and ends that they seek to realize and which recursively grant them their distinctive ontological status. Friends and marriages are ontologically distinct from one another because of the end or purpose of each recursively define the ways we relate, the norms we follow, and the ends we seek to achieve as a result. When I occupy a place in a social structure, I conform in some sense to the role that the structure defines for that role. This role is constituted by norms and practices that enact the relational patterns of the structure. But the structure has its own dynamic that makes it what it is: a dynamic in that it shapes the practices and norms that produce the relations that constitute the structure. Social structures are dynamic in that they possess causal powers over the individuals that constitute them (see Elder-Vass, 2010), but they also are dynamic in that they are constituted by patterns of practices that shape the affective and cognitive orientations of the individual members involved within them. The nature of these relations between the members of any structural relatum is causal in a reciprocal way: the practices between the relata of any relatum take on a causal reciprocity with one another when the mutual interaction of each on the other changes and shapes and mutually determines the ways that each member acts in tandem with the other. David Weissman says of this kind of reciprocity that “Causal reciprocity is the relation of agents whose characters or behaviors are mutually determining, hence mutually controlling, over a cycle of back-and-forth interactions” (Weissman, 2000, p. 46; also cf. Brown, 2014, p. 294ff.). But this mutuality, pace Weissman, does not simply describe a mere interaction of individuals, it constitutes a distinct ontological sphere in that it is a distinct realm of reality. In that sphere, the individuals are themselves changed. Friends treat one another differently than strangers; and they do this as a result of the mutual ways in which they organize and enact their relational practices with one another. In this way, social structures are really much more than structures in that they instantiate relational patterns of practices that form systems. 2.3 | Dynamism and system Relational structures are practical insofar as they are patterned schemes of practices that enact relations with others. But these relations and structures are also dynamic in nature by which I mean they are always being enacted by the practices that govern our behaviors. The importance of seeing social reality as dynamic is that it grants to social entities or social structures a feature of independence from each individual within them. Marriages are enacted by members of that specific social structure, but they, in turn, shape (or can fail to shape) the individuals themselves. There is a causal reciprocity between the individuals enacting the social relation and the social structure acting back upon them. To be a husband is to enact a role, a role that is prescribed in many ways by the patterned norms and practices that give shape to the relational structure of a marriage. But it is also the case that marriages are an existent social scheme that has external and independent existence from me. As a bachelor I may seek out a relation with another person whom I would like to marry (or doggedly avoid any such relation). But in either case, it is because I am aware that to marry would require a transformation of TOWARD A CRITICAL SOCIAL ONTOLOGY 69 the norms and practices and relations that shape my life as well as that other person to whom I might relate. Each mutually affect the other: my adoption of new norms and practices requires the other's adoption of reciprocal norms and practices for the relation to succeed as a marriage, or as a friendship, or some other form of enduring social relation. Marriage, like other social structures and institutions, therefore has an independence and a causal power over my own individual life—it possesses an ontology in that it consists of norms and practices that enact a kind of relational structure to another that realizes the purpose of being married. This is because of the specific forms of causal reciprocity that are patterned by the relations of such a structure—this causal reciprocity is enacted by the adoption of (via internalization) of norms that organize certain practices that generate the relation of being married and which make the relationship of marriage ontologically distinct from other kinds of relations. The systemic nature of the relations between the members of a marriage or a family is mutually determinative of the other: the practices and norms that underwrite them are organized in such a way as to make constitute a process of reciprocal interaction between the members of these social forms. They possess an ontological weight in the sense that they are social structures that are also systems that entail a processual change in the individuals that make them up: they change and shape the phylogenetic capacities I possess as a practical, relational being. This inherent relation of practices and relatedness forms a causal nexus within each of us toward practical affiliative behavior; it forms the background for our development as social, norm-following, beings. This practical-relational nexus is therefore a property of each of us as individuals; a property that when combined with others forms the generative power of which social reality is a product. When we affiliate in practical ways with others, that is, to realize ends together, we develop norm-following patterns of behavior that begin to form systems. The importance of emphasizing systems and processes is that they capture the ways that social structures embody dynamics relations between members of a social forms. Social processes have their own ontology in that they generate higher-order systems than the members involved (Renault, 2016; Rescher, 1996; Seibt, 2005). To say this is to convey the idea that a systemic process is one that a marriage is more than: [person A] + [person B] with a collectively agreed upon status of “married.” The reason for this is that causal reciprocity is in play: person A and person B perform practices that re-shape who they are: what kinds of norms they will follow, practices they will enact, and so on—if the marriage is to work successfully. The marriage has a causal power over their practices and relation, and this is how dynamic relations of reciprocity generate different forms of social being: new norms, new practices are generated to construct the ontology of the marriage. Any social form achieves its ontological weight from the fact that our relations with others generate some different structure with its own dynamics than comes to shape and transform the ontogenetic nature of the members involved. In this way, we can talk about marriages, schools, markets, and so on as possessing an ontology that does not supervene on the individuals involved, but rather as macro social forms (or what I will call social schemes) as distinct objects with their own structures of relations, systemic dynamics, and purposes or ends. When patterns of causally reciprocal relations between agents are established, the process of socialization becomes necessary to prepare members of the social form to take on the requisite roles that determine the necessary norms and practices within that social form. The patterns of social life that form institutions and social schemes are therefore dependent on a deeper capacity for sociality than any kind of “cognitivist” rule-following or system of beliefs which are only made possible via the relational structures that socialize us (see Giovagnoli & Marchetti, 2020). These mutual interactions are not entered into as in a game-theoretic model (see Guala & Hindriks, 2015), but are developed ontogenetic capacities of agents rooted in our early development within frameworks of attachment and therefore subject to the influence of the social whole. Spartans would have raised their children, 70 THOMPSON organized their families, with different affective bonds than modern individuals within industrial or post-industrial societies. These are more than game-theoretic solutions, they shape the subjectivity of subjects, the ways they feel, think, and the ethical conscience they possess as well. Norms, practices, and relations are therefore not merely equilibrium solutions to games, they are more deeply held in that they possess affective and cathectic dimensions of the self via self-object relations to others. We gain a sense of ourselves of who we are, our identity, roles, and so on, via the recognitive relations that we enter into with others. The capacity to acquire the norms and practices for any social form is a developed ontogenetic feature of social mentation that is developed as a result of higher organization and development of our phylogenetic capacities for sociality (relationality, intentionality, purposive activity or teleological thinking, and so on). As humans, we possess also the capacity for a self-consciousness of our ontology, of the categories that generate our social world. We have the ability to make this ontology a matter of reflection and possible mutative change—a change that occurs within as well as between the individual members of the social world. The result is a new form of life in that the forms of social being (psychological as well as cultural) are transformed and the kinds of social reality they generate are also transformed. The key idea is that systemic, causal reciprocal relations between individuals within a structurally patterned set of relations shapes the inner cognitive, affective, and psychic domains of the self as well. Social institutions can therefore be seen as more than the sum of their parts in that they are ontologically differentiated from the properties of isolated, atomistic beings. The former may possess the practical-relational nexus, but without actually existing enduring relations with others, this phylogenetic capacity remains un- or underdeveloped and social reality would be impossible. The practical-relational nexus that is a core capacity of human agents is only activated by practically relating to others. This is one reason why human infants take such a long time to become fully socialized and to even develop capacities for norm-following and intentionality (Tomasello, 2019). But even more, these institutional forms are in fact highly evolved artifacts of practical-relational life: they are expressions of patterned, cooperative practices that seek to realize some end in the world. 2.4 | Purposes and ends As I argued above, a social practice is a form of action that is oriented toward some end or purpose. This was because it was a distinctive form of human action that connected some intention or mental project or idea to its realization in the world of nature. Aristotle's term for the end or purpose of practice is “a thing done” (τὸ πρακτόν) which, in Greek, conveys the idea that a practice has as its end literally “the thing practiced” or “done.” Aristotle's idea seems to be that human praxis has an inherently teleological structure in that all we do as social beings is oriented toward some end. This can be the case for actual social artifacts such as spears or wooden desks (themselves social-ontological in that they are the physical product of human practices or, as in Marx, the reorganization of nature by human praxis), or in terms of communication as with moving air with our mouths to produce spoken language or moving our facial musculature to produce a specific expression that conveys some meaning to another. The point is that practices are what they are by virtue of their end or purpose: that is, practices are inherently teleological in that they have some basic intent or end in mind that they seek to realize in the world.1 These ends are also what make us more than mere desiring or mere instinctual beings, for the fact that we can pursue a finite end, such as cooking a meal, is certainly the mark of an intention and a capacity to manipulate the material world in accordance with some purpose; but we can also pursue what Sebastian Rödl terms “infinite ends,” such as cooking healthy meals to sustain a healthy life. In TOWARD A CRITICAL SOCIAL ONTOLOGY 71 this case, the end is not something that I obtain in some discrete sense, but rather it permeates all (or some general grouping) of my intentions and practices (see Rödl, 2007, p. 34ff.). The basic point is that the pursuing of such ends is a mark of self-consciousness and, as such, is a property of distinctively human ways of acting in the world. This property of practices is carried over into the cooperative world of social institutions in that every social form has some end or purpose that they seek to realize or to obtain in some basic sense. When we relate to another person in some form of sociality, we orient our practices or adopt practices will produce and maintain the relation. This may be an end in itself, as with friendship, or it may be to achieve a different end, such as the relation between a teacher and a student. The point is that a practice is a feature of human life that is distributed throughout higher forms of organization and cooperation. Social practices take shape within social relations; these relations constitute higher structures of relatedness which possess dynamic and processual properties capturing their capacity to act as groups. But this, too, seems to run up against the idea that an end, a purpose, a telos, is the organizing principle of institutions as well as the property of a social practice. This is because the former are essentially the aggregation of patterned relational structures of the latter; they also take on the higher properties of dynamic and system that allows for macro social entities to realize ends. When we form structured, systemically reciprocal relations with others, we also orient our practices toward some end. So, families seek to maintain these metaphysical features to maintain their cohesion and realize security and mutual growth; the members of a symphony orchestra will orient their playing in relation to each other to produce a collaborative end, a symphony, and so on. The nature of the relations and practices are themselves shaped by the kind of ends prized. Slavery is a system of social relations meant on producing a specific kind of end: absolute surplus; wage labor is organized for a different kind of end: capital via commodity consumption, and so on. 3 | SOCIAL SCHEMES AND GENERATIVITY The categories outlined above are meant to provide us with proto-metaphysical concepts that underwrite all forms of social life. In this sense, it provides us with an account of not only actualized, empirical institutions, but how social life is made up of overlapping forms of social life each with their own distinct kinds of practices, relations, systems, purposes, and ends. I call these social schemes and define them as distinct patterns of sociality, each of which has their own specific end that organizes them. Society as a whole is made up of overlapping social schemes: schools, families, administrative agencies, friendships, and so on. Individuals therefore occupy multiple locations in these different schemes; they form the backdrop of our social ontogenesis in that they shape our socialization, that is, the norms and practices that generate the relations, structures, systems, and ends that also make up each social scheme. Social schemes are institutions, to be sure, but they are more fundamentally schemes, or patterns of practices, relations, systemic structures, and ends as ontological entities. Also society is defined by the multiplicity of these schemes, some of which interact and interpenetrate with one another, some of which are independent of others. The social is the existing world of social schemes that shapes and orients our sociality, our specific social reality. It is what makes different societies distinct: whether in a synchronic sense (culturally at any given time) or diachronically (in an historical sense). Our affiliative behavior is therefore best conceived as a phylogenetic capacity that precedes and make possible the ontogenetic capacities for different kinds of sociality—for friendships, citizenship, families, enemies, and so on. Since the teleological structure of practices is at the heart of my account of social reality, it is through this distinctively human kind of activity paired with out affiliative capacities that effectively generates the 72 THOMPSON social world. In contrast to Searle's view that “[i]nstitutional reality is a system of status functions” (Searle, 2010, p. 167), my account stresses the thicker and deeper conception of social reality in that the practical, relational, systemic and teleological dimensions of human social reality serve as the framework within which status functions are articulated. Indeed, the very status functions that are required for this account themselves rely on relational dynamics that are themselves phylogenetic to human social life. A generative account of social ontology takes the position that our practical relations with others, the formation of reciprocal relational systems, and the realization of ends or purposes generates a richer form of reality than can be accounted for via the properties of the individuals alone that constitute them. When we collaborate or cooperate with others, we are generating a new social reality but also, potentially, new forms of material reality as well. Building a bridge requires so many overlapping levels of teleological positing in the world as well as relational systems of cooperation to realize them that viewing it as a system of status functions is far too thin an account. Generativity describes the idea that our social world is a product of these practices, relations, and end-positing activities, and that it is a richer, more complex reality than can be accounted for by the properties of the individuals that make them up. We generate not only social schemes and institutions, we also generate new forms of material reality by reworking nature into objects with richer capacities than their natural status. Both social entities and social artifacts can be captured by this account. Political parties are generated by certain kinds of practices, social relations, and purposes just as a house is generated by the practices, relations and purposes of architects, bricklayers, carpenters, and so on. They are not the result of our mental projections onto the world but are generated as concrete forms of life via the specific ways that practices are shaped into relations, relations into structures, structures into systems, and the purposes toward which they are oriented and which give them coherence. This is not to say that there exist no collective intentions or collective norms. What it does show is that social entities exist in a metaphysical sense and not merely in a mental sense; they are concrete in that our ideas about acting in the world actively shape that world and grant it its ontology. 4 | THE METAPHYSICS OF SOCIAL POWER Power is a core feature of an ontology of social entities because without it there can be no coherence of institutions or any other kind of social entity. Power in this sense refers to the ability for social entities to be created and to be maintained; it refers to the efficient cause of our social schemes. Power, in my sense, refers to the capacity of individuals as well as to institutions to determine some other object or agent, including oneself as an individual. Power from an ontological perspective is the capacity to enact and/or to create a practice or relation with another. My capacity to realize an end in the world is a fundamental form of power—a capacity to make an idea into an external, objective reality. When individuals come together to cooperate and collaborate toward a more complex end, then the quotient of power increases. But power is also in play when we organize these coordinative social schemes. We have the capacity to coordinate our activities, but it is also possible that this power can become authority or even domination. The former is the result of recognized consent the latter results in some surplus benefit for an agent at the expense of another. In either case, practices, norms, relations, and ends are created or (re)shaped by certain agents within the community. In its most basic form, this is an ethically neutral and descriptive category. My capacity to take a branch from a tree and fashion it into a spear is a power I possess—a power to shape an object of nature into an artifact of my own design; I effectively project my thought into the world via a manipulation of physical matter. This capacity also extends to social facts as well: the relations we have with others TOWARD A CRITICAL SOCIAL ONTOLOGY 73 and the systems that they generate via our patterned interactions with others underwrite the metaphysics of social world. We magnify this power when we cooperate with others to realize some more complex end or purpose: building a bridge, an electrical network, a corporation, a school, or some other institution or social artifact. In these cases, a larger social end is realized via our cooperative activities. The capacity to form a cooperative unit is itself dependent on the basic social-metaphysical categories I outlined in section 2. These enable us to generate cooperative practices, norms, relations, and purposes, to form social schemes that enable us to realize complex ends in the world. In the process, our power is also magnified in the form of what Talcott Parsons terms “collective power” (Parsons, 1960; cf. Arendt, 1970) where the quantity of cooperative members achieves a qualitative change in the nature of the power wielded. But all of this is merely descriptive of a capacity that can be distorted. Social power has a distributional character that shifts the very ontology of the social world. This means that the more the resources requisite for possessing some kind of social power are maldistributed, the more domination a society will engender. In terms of social metaphysics, this means that the generative categories I explored above (those of practices, relations, structures, systems, ends, and purposes) will be shaped by and in the interest of those with control of those resources. The factor that makes power into domination is that the shared, collectively enacted systems of social reality that form our lives and social schemes are organized and determined by those with unequal control of social resources as opposed to collaboratively determined. Hence, the very fabric of the social world is affected by domination and power—not only the cognitive and symbolic realm, but the relational, practical, and teleological structures of social reality that underpin them. But the ontology of power changes when it is unevenly distributed among members of the community. Power always exists within a social scheme; its distribution within it determines what kind of power (shared, authority, domination, and so on) is exercised. When social power is dispersed in some generally equal way, when it is shared, then our practices take on a more collaborative character in that each member of the social scheme intend for the larger end of the group to be realized. Its ends are their own ends, in some basic sense. However, when some inequality of social power begins to emerge, then the capacity of some subgroup within the community is able to shape the practices, relations, structures, systems, and ends that make up the lives of others and, perhaps, the community as a whole. The more power that any subgroup has over the remainder the community, the more social power becomes social domination: that is, the capacity to organize the ontology of the social world— the norms, practices, relations, and systems that constitute the community—according to the ends and desires of those with the power to do so (see Thompson, 2017). I think this view of power both draws on and differs from John Searle's account of “deontic power,” or “the ability of an agent of power to get subjects to do what the agents wants them to do whether the subjects want to do so or not” (Searle, 2010, p. 147). The key idea behind Searle's account of deontic power is that it is non-coercive because it seeks to get people to do things by making them want to or at least obligate them somehow in conscience: “power is exercised when the agent makes the subject want something he or she would not otherwise have wanted or limits the subject's perception of the available options” (Searle, 2010, p. 160). Searle's conception of power is persuasive in that it accounts for the ways that any agent exercising power has the capacity to shape the activity of another. However, it is also limited in that it is restricted to the status function account of social metaphysics. In this sense, power is a result of the ways that we assign statuses to individuals and accept them as legitimate. But Searle's theory of power can be more robustly developed if we take into consideration the fundamental metaphysical categories for social schemes that I explored above: specifically, social power is the capacity to shape or to organize the practical, relational, and teleological dimensions of our social reality. 74 THOMPSON If, as in Searle's theory, I am able to get you to do something I want to you to do, I am effectively replacing your own ends and purposes with ends and purposes that I wish to assign to you. If I have social power as opposed to a personal capacity as power, then this means I have some resource that enables me to organize the practical-relational world in some basic sense. Egyptian Pharaohs were able to organize whole swaths of the society to build them temples: they possessed the power to shape the forms of cooperation of the community toward their own ends and purposes. Similarly with slavery or with the modern business corporations: they all have power not only because of the status functions they are able to command, but because to obtain the power to inscribe those status functions into the conscience of individuals. In addition, they are able to organize the ontology of a social scheme that shapes the activities of others. In this sense, the metaphysics of social power can be grasped as the capacity to shape the practical-relational and teleological dimensions of our social world. It entails the capacity to organize relations, to posit ends, to shape practices that others will perform. It becomes domination when this kind of power is imposed by some subgroup of the community for their benefit and at some expense of those over whom the power is exercised. Searle's view of deontic power speaks to questions of obligation: that is, how it is that status functions and be created that confer the capacity for one agent to have power over another. But this seems to be only a partial account of a metaphysics of social power. These status functions not only articulate, they also sustain certain kinds of practices, relations, systems, and ends. A butler may view himself and the family he serves in terms of the roles ascribed by that specific ontology: he may see himself as one who serves this family and they as people who are to be served by him. But the status functions that enable a member of that family to have him pour them wine or answer the door for them is the result of a broader fabric of social power that is unevenly distributed and made possible by some inequality of resources. One key resource for social is economic, broadly construed. This inequality of economic resources allows certain agents of the community to shape practices, relations, systems, and ends. The higher the gradient of this resource inequality, the broader the scope of social power conferred on those who wield it. Since all of us live within a bounded framework web of relations, this power is gradually able to reorganize the fundamental categories of the ontology of that relational web. Butlers are possible only in a world where some have been able to control the ability of others to posit their own ends; where the possibility of being a butler is even possible let alone an option of some worth. When social power becomes domination—that is, when it becomes a capacity to shape the very ontology within which you live and operate your life—then we are getting closer to a richer account of how social reality, and social power, actually operate in the world. My capacity for self-determination is limited by the scope of domination because the powerful are able to determine the social context within which I operate. Those with the control of social resources have the capacity to articulate the norms and constitutive rules and status functions that others will adopt in order for specific relations, practices, systems, and ends to become manifest in the world. They have the literal capacity to form our social reality. Resources need not be reduced to economic ones for this account to remain explanatory. In general, parents possess unequal cognitive and physical resources with respect to their children, thereby enabling them to determine how their children will live, behave, think, and feel. These unequal resources may be seen more in terms of authority than domination in that the purpose of the determining power is not to extract some benefit but (if a parent's intentions are moral) to develop the child's capacities for independence and self-determination in maturity. Other resources may be more psychological, such as charismatic authority where individuals possess the power to manipulate those that are inspired by them, and so on. Indeed, each of these examples include some application of status functions, in other words, they need to include Searle's account of deontic power. But my overall point is that this account of deontic power is itself embedded in a deeper ontology of social reality such that TOWARD A CRITICAL SOCIAL ONTOLOGY 75 it is a factor in how our relations are articulated. Once this is the case, then the entirety of our social ontology will also shift since there are no practices without relations (and vice versa), nor without systems and ends. The important feature of the seeing power in this way is that the positing of ends retrogressively patterns the organization of practices and relations needed to realize them. If three people are moving a piano from one house to another, this requires that each of the three members of that cooperative unit plan the ways they will cooperate with one another and who will do what at what time. Cooperation becomes more than acting together in that each behaves according to their place within the relational nexus of acting together to move the piano in an agreement with how they will work together. In this sense, cooperation becomes collaboration in that each authorizes the ends toward which they are working together. But when this power becomes domination, then some subset of the community has been able to shape the practices, relations, and ends of any social scheme from one that is collaborative to one that is exploitative; they are able to reshape the social scheme, the very social reality within which the members of the social scheme move. But this power can become more than a shared capacity to collaborate toward a shared intention, end, or purpose. It is often the case that human communities are shaped to realize not collaborative ends, but rather ends that are determined or set by others. In this case, power can again morph into domination: or the capacity of another to determine the ends and social structures and dynamics needed to realize them. But the key idea behind domination in an ontological sense is that the purpose of this determining power is to get others to perform practices, adopt norms, structure relations, and posit ends that benefit the agent wielding that power. Domination is a form of power but it is in play not only in discrete acts or statuses, it manifests in a broader social reality that sustains that power. In this case, power is not self-determining but dominating; it describes a capacity to shape the norms, practices, relations, systems, and end of social groups according to the purposes and intentions of the agent or group that dominates. I think this is one reason why power needs to be seen as a central category in any approach to social metaphysics. Without some account of power, there is no way to understand how our social forms are held together, how they are given the specific shapes that they manifest. The norms and practices we enact and the relations we come to enact and which shape us no less than the ends and purposes toward which our collective efforts are put are organized by some kind of power: they can be collaboratively articulated where power is dispersed throughout the social scheme or community, or they can be an expression of domination, as when some smaller subset of the community is able to organize the ontology of the world we live in. The more democratic and egalitarian a community is, the more it may rely on collaborative forms of articulating norms, practices, relations, systems, and ends. The more inegalitarian a social scheme or society as a whole may be, the more domination may be present and affect the ways that these categories are articulated. Power is not only, therefore, a phylogenetic capacity that we possess as humans—the power to realize an end being the most basic substrate of all forms of human power—but it is also a collective property of social groups in that, by means of cooperation, we can magnify our capacities and realize more complex ends in the world. The ontogenesis of individuals is therefore in many ways dependent on the specific shapes of the social schemes that socialize us. 5 | SOCIAL ONTOLOGY AND PRACTICAL REASON If power is a central variable in understanding the nature and structure of the ontology of social forms, then I would next like to suggest that this is an intrinsically ethical and political concern. The reason 76 THOMPSON for this is that once we become aware of the generative categories that underwrite our social reality, we can then open these up to critical inquiry and reflection; we can see them in rational as opposed to reified or tacit terms and subject them to scrutiny and potential transformation. Once we admit to the idea that power is a capacity that is distributional in nature, this means that how power is distributed and for what purposes becomes a core aspect of any approach to social metaphysics. For we should not merely be concerned with the explanatory power of social metaphysics, but also with how it can be used to evaluate the nature of any given social fact or social scheme. Indeed, thus far I have outlined an approach to social metaphysics that takes into account the generative dynamic of our essentially phylogenetic capacities as social beings to form higher, more complex forms of social reality. But in addition, I have proposed that power has ontological status in that no practice, norm, or relation can be sustained among a group over time without some kind of power being agreed upon or imposed to keep that social form together. The given social ontology of our world is itself the product of certain kinds of power distributions: powers to shape and/or sanction norms, practices, relations, systems, and ends that constitute the very substance of our social reality. What I would like to suggest now is that this approach to social metaphysics can also inform our normative and practical concerns and help us ground a more critical conception of evaluative judgment of our social world. One reason for seeing an informative relation between social metaphysics and practical reason is that it enables us to capture the reasons that undergird our obligations toward others and the institutions we inhabit in particular as well as the purposes of our society as a whole. As David Weissman has pointed out, “the responsibilities of a system's parts to the system and to one another do not become a focus for morality until we humans discover and redescribe them as duties” (Weissman, 2000, p. 120; also see Brown, 2014, p. 384ff.). I think we can add to this the question of what the ends and purposes of the different social schemes we inhabit actually realize. More specifically, what are the purposes of the systems of relations and the internalized norms and practices that make up any institution or social form? How is power being used to shape and organize these institutions and social forms? What kind of obligation do I have toward them and toward the systemic social relations that ensconce me? As I argued above, power is a key concept in social ontology to the extent that it is the force that maintains cohesion of social forms. Searle's concept of “deontic power” is one core way this is achieved: each of us adopts obligations toward others given the status functions they have been assigned and which I take up and internalize as part of my navigating my social reality. But this deontic power itself must rest on a prior concept of power that shapes the social world in specific ways: that is, that shapes the norms, practices, relations, and ends that make up the ontological substance of social forms. The assignment of status functions occurs within that context; but that context requires a form of power to shape the general ontology of social reality. This means that any deontic commitment contains within it the possibility that we can deny that obligation, that we can inquire into the ends toward which our practical and relational world has been organized to obtain. In contrast to pragmatist ideas about moral validity and democratic consent, an approach to these questions informed by a critical social metaphysics would enable us to look for the validity of our normative ideas and principles of justice not in terms of intersubjective agreement or some a priori social contract, but, rather, in terms of the actual forms of life that we would want to see realized in the world. Social metaphysics can therefore be seen to inform practical reason insofar as our social world is constituted by types of power: either by collaborative forms of collective power, dominating forms of determining power, or even authoritative forms of guiding power. These forms of power shape very different kinds of reality: different kinds of relations, practices, norms, systems, and ends. They also engender very different kinds of agency: they cultivate different powers of evaluative reason, different kinds of deontic commitments, different normative processes (conscious and TOWARD A CRITICAL SOCIAL ONTOLOGY 77 unconscious), and so on. The ontology of the social world also affects the very ontogeny of the individuals that make it up. A society with deeply ingrained racist beliefs will articulate a social world where our practical-relational nexus and world-generating powers exclude and even perhaps degrade the being of those excluded and marginalized members. The same can be said about gender and class: categories that are not merely made up of status functions and collective-intentional rule sets, but also by the ways that the practical-relational nexus of members of the community are organized to generate a specific kind of social world. Practical reason now can be seen to have a more concrete relevance to the world: to view a social relation, practice, or end as wrong or unjust entails its transformation. 6 | CONCLUSION One core aim of this paper has been to demonstrate the possibility of a critical social ontology: that is, an ontology that can serve not only descriptive and explanatory functions, but also evaluative aims as well. First, I have suggested that a fundamental ontology of social forms can give us a richer account of the social world than the standard cognitivist account that relies on status functions and collective intentionality. I also argued that our innate capacities for practices and relations with others constitute a practical-relational nexus that is generative of richer, more complex forms of social reality through cooperative and mutually reciprocal forms of interaction that generate social systems that can realize more complex ends than individuals alone are capable. A social metaphysics that incorporates generativity is therefore one that is able to capture the dynamic and complex dimensions of social reality. I also argued that power is a crucial concept for understanding the nature of the social world in that it is a capacity to shape and to alter the fundamental categories that underwrite the social world as well as the assignment of function and deontic powers that these social forms require for their sustenance and stability. Last, I argued that social metaphysics can inform our practical reasoning by granting us a more realist account of how our commitments and obligations are embedded in forms of social reality that beg for our reflective endorsement on the ends that our social schemes and forms realize. One final thought: a critical social ontology demonstrates how an approach to social reality can take into account the empirical aspects of human phylogenetic capacities and the ways they are shaped and developed within any given social-ontological framework. Although I do not reject constructivist aspects to the social world, it does seem to me to be only a partial account of social reality. A critical social metaphysics starts from the premise that the ontology of the social world accounts for real entities in the world, not only for the cognitive basis for the assignment of function of social facts. The social is a concept with its own distinct ontology; and human beings are, in the most basic sense, social beings who are also practical beings. A critical social ontology can open up for us in deeper more satisfying ways questions of ethics, of normativity, as well as of justice and politics. This paper should be viewed as little more than an entrée into a more robust and comprehensive theory of social reality and the human condition more broadly. ORCID Michael J. Thompson https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6428-9817 ENDNOTE 1 Contrast this view of a social practice from that of Haslanger (2020). 78 THOMPSON REFERENCES Arendt, H. (1970). On violence. Harcourt Brace. Aristotle. (1968). Nicomachean ethics. Oxford Classical Texts. Oxford University Press. Brown, M. E. (2014). The concept of the social in uniting the humanities and social sciences. Temple University Press. Elder-Vass, D. (2010). The causal power of social structure: Emergence, structure and agency. Cambridge University Press. Epstein, B. (2006). Ontological Individualism Reconsidered. Synthese, 166, 187–213. Epstein, B. (2015). The ant trap: Rebuilding the foundations of the social sciences. Oxford University Press. Giovagnoli, R., & Marchetti, J. (2020). 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How to cite this article: Thompson, M. J. (2023). Toward a critical social ontology. The Philosophical Forum, 54, 61–78. https://doi.org/10.1111/phil.12334