Tag: social science

The social model of disability as a case study of social ontology

Picture of a staircase
Photo by Alessia Cocconi on Unsplash

Social ontology is a branch of philosophy that tries to understand the building blocks of the social world. Debates in social ontology can be abstract and seem pointless. Even defining social ontology, and how it differs from, say, sociology, is a challenge (see Epstein, 2021). There has been a case to “rid social sciences of ontology altogether – of all philosophized metaphysics of how the social world is” (Kivinen and Piiroinen, 2007, p.99). This brief post tries to show why social ontology is important, using the social model of disability as an example.

In 1975, the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation, a group of disability activists, published a series of fundamental principles which challenged the ontology of disability:

“In our view, it is society which disables physically impaired people. Disability is something imposed on top of our impairments, by the way we are unnecessarily isolated and excluded from full participation in society. Disabled people are therefore an oppressed group in society. […] For us as disabled people it is absolutely vital that we get this question of the cause of disability quite straight, because on the answer depends the crucial matter of where we direct our main energies in the struggle for change. We shall clearly get nowhere if our efforts are chiefly directed not at the cause of our oppression, but instead at one of the symptoms.”

Here a distinction is made between impairment and disability. From this perspective, it makes no sense to say that someone “has a disability”; individual people can have impairments, but it is society that determines whether someone is disabled. A vivid example of this is how common it still is for buildings not to be wheelchair accessible – or only partly so, e.g., wheelchair users can enter a building but not use its toilets. Note how the conceptualisation is used to unite people behind a social struggle. It has a practical purpose rather than only adding to our knowledge.

Conceptualisations of impairment and disability, social barriers, and adjustments concern social ontology. Debates on these topics occur naturally in social struggles and discussions of social policy and identity, whether or not explicitly articulated as being about ontology. They also have clear implication for how social science is carried out and how research findings are used.

More posts on social ontology

References

Epstein, B. (2021). Social Ontology. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2021 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.).

Kivinen, O., & Piiroinen, T. (2007). Sociologizing Metaphysics and Mind: A Pragmatist Point of View on the Methodology of the Social Science. Human Studies, 30, 97–114.

Brands

Photo by Polina Tankilevitch

 

CBT versus counselling. Mental models versus mental rules. Bayesianism versus everything. There are lots of brand wars in psychology which stifle the development of theory and lead to tedious arguments. This does get recognised in print now and again. Here are some examples.

The first comes from a discussion of the ACT-R theory (Anderson, 2007, p. 19):

“… this book is not about ACT-R; rather I am using ACT-R as a tool to describe the mind. […] We may be proud of our ACT-R models and think they are better than others […] but we try not to lose track of the fact that they are just a way of describing what is really of interest.”

Later (p. 239) Anderson cites Herbert Simon, who complained that

“… ‘brand names’ tend to make difficult the analysis and comparison of […] mechanisms or the exchange of knowledge between research groups. […] Physicists did not divide quantum mechanics into the Heisenberg Brand, the Schrodinger Brand, and the Dirac brand.”

Another example, from sociology: a book on social class (Wright, 1997, p. 34):

“Readers who are highly skeptical of the Marxist tradition for whatever reasons might feel that there is no point in struggling through the numbers and graphs in the rest of this book. If the conceptual justifications for the categories are unredeemably flawed, it might be thought, the empirical results generated with those categories will be worthless. This would be, I think, a mistake. The empirical categories themselves can be interpreted in a Weberian or hybrid manner. […] As is usually the case in sociology, the empirical categories are underdetermined by the theoretical frameworks within which they are generated or interpreted.”

References

Anderson, J. R. (2007). How can the human mind occur in the physical universe? Oxford University Press

Wright, E. O. (1997). Class counts: student edition. Cambridge University Press.

John Fox on SEM

From an Appendix to An R and S-PLUS Companion to Applied Regression:

“A cynical view of SEMs is that their popularity in the social sciences reflects the legitimacy that the models appear to lend to causal interpretation of observational data, when in fact such interpretation is no less problematic than for other kinds of regression models applied to observational data. A more charitable interpretation is that SEMs are close to the kind of informal thinking about causal relationships that is common in social-science theorizing, and that, therefore, these models facilitate translating such theories into data analysis.”