Social Reality Without Language
According to a popular view, the creation of social reality requires language: social institutions emerge when we successfully declare them into existence. Making language central to institutions deprives the non-human of any claim to a social reality. This is particularly problematic in the light...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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University of Vienna
2023-04-01
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| Series: | Journal of Social Ontology |
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| Online Access: | https://journalofsocialontology.org/index.php/jso/article/view/7111 |
| Summary: | According to a popular view, the creation of social reality requires language: social institutions emerge when we successfully declare them into existence. Making language central to institutions deprives the non-human of any claim to a social reality. This is particularly problematic in the light of mounting research showing many animals have social institutions even in the absence of language. In this paper, I will offer an alternative view. I will employ a concept –enacted representation– from the distributed cognition framework of cognitive science to develop a social ontology that does not take language as a requirement to create social institutions.
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| ISSN: | 2196-9663 |