Nature, Social Relations and Human Needs Content Type Journal Article Category Review Pages 510-514 DOI 10.1558/jcr.v11i4.510 Authors Raymond Murphy, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Ottawa, 120 University, Ottawa ON K1N6N5 Canada Journal Journal of Critical Realism Online ISSN 1572-5138 Print ISSN 1476-7430 Journal Volume Volume 11 Journal Issue Volume 11, Number 4 / 2012.

This paper replies to Porpora, King, and Varela's responses to my earlier paper “For Emergence”, focussing on the relationship between the concepts of social structure and social relations. It recognises the importance of identifying the mechanisms responsible whenever we make claims for the emergence of causal powers, and discusses the mechanism underlying one case of social structure: normative institutions. It also shows how critical realism reconciles the claims that both social structures and human individuals have (...) emergent causal powers that combine to produce actual social events. (shrink)

This essay analyzes the nature of social relations when individual identity is conceived as both autonomous and socially constructed. Viewing identity as autonomous and socially constructed makes it necessary both to conceive individuals as socially related to others in the present and past, and to incorporate individuals into multiple systems of social relations. I argue that George Herbert Mead’s theory of social systems provides a basis for performing these tasks. By adding a concept of “contemporaneous (...) consciousness” to Mead’s notion of temporal systems, it is possible to view individuals as autonomous within a multiplicity of temporal systems. (shrink)

Tyler Burge has argued that a necessary condition for individual's having many of the thoughts he has is that he bear certain relations to other language users. Burge's conclusion is based on a thought experiment in which an individual's social relations are imagined, counterfactually, to differ from how they are actually. The result is that it seems, counterfactually, the individual cannot be attributed many of the thoughts he can be actually. In the article, an alternative interpretation of (...) Burge's thought experiment is offered on which the intuitions Burge evokes can be accepted while his conclusion about the social character of thought is denied. The alternative interpretation given, it is then argued that it is preferable to Burge's. (shrink)

Bringing together some of the most eminent thinkers in the field, this book celebrates the seminal contribution of Ted Benton to such pressing themes as: realism, naturalism and the philosophy of the social sciences, the continuing relevance of Marxism, philosophical anthropology and human needs, and ecology, society and natural limits.

Until the end of the last century, media sociology was synonymous with the investigation of mass media as a social domain. Today, media sociology needs to address a much higher level of complexity, that is, a deeply mediatized world in which all human practices, social relations, and social order are entangled with digital media and their infrastructures. This article discusses this shift from a sociology of mass communication to the sociology of a deeply mediatized world. The (...) principal aim of the article is to outline a new media-sociological imagination: media sociology as a cross-sectional sociology, a sociology of entanglement, and a new critical sociology of technological deep structures. (shrink)

Little is known about the psychological processes that can explain how connectedness to nature evolves. From social psychology, we know that emotions play an essential role when connecting to others. In this article, we argue that social connectedness and connectedness to nature are underpinned by the same emotions. More specifically, we propose that social relational emotions are crucial to understanding the process, how humans connect to nature. Beside other emotions, kama muta (Sanskrit: being moved by love) might (...) play a particular crucial role when connecting to nature. Future research should address the consideration of social relational emotions in a range of areas when investigating the human-nature relationship. (shrink)

Sociologists usually conceive of emotions as individual, episodic, and categorical phenomena while emphasizing their social and cultural construction. At the same time, the term emotion refers to a wide range of conceptually and ontologically distinct components and is therefore best thought of as a relatively unspecific umbrella term. This article argues that the routes leading to the social and cultural construction of emotion, for example, norms, rules, values, and discourse, are unlikely to be applicable to each of these (...) components in the same way. This is particularly true for an element of emotion that is often portrayed as being most essential and basic and therefore to some extent avoiding the formative forces of culture and society, namely, affect. Although affect is an established notion in sociology, it has remained conceptually underdeveloped. The article therefore discusses different perspectives on affect from cultural studies that emphasize its relational and bodily character. In a second step, it contrasts and reconciles these views with existing theories of affect in sociology and social psychology and considers a number of essential characteristics that can be used to circumscribe affect and its social and cultural correlates. Finally, concepts from relational sociology are introduced and concrete examples to specify the relational character of affect and to develop an understanding of affect, that is both theoretically fruitful and conducive to empirical research, are discussed. (shrink)

Some theorists argue that relational egalitarianism offers no guidance for questions of justice between non-overlapping generations because the relevant kinds of social relations do not exist. To assess this challenge, I distinguish two versions of relational egalitarianism: an interpersonal approach that focuses on particular kinds of dispositions and attitudes, and an institutional approach that focuses on the kind of status people hold under institutions. I argue that the institutional approach meets the challenge. To illustrate this claim, I discuss (...) several cases involving climate change, public debt, and paternalism. Finally, I suggest how the approach I develop bears on the non-identity problem and on the choice of intergenerational distributive principle. (shrink)

Sociology has been often defined as a science of "social relations". The aim of this article is to contribute to the clarification of this concept. I take into account only two classic analytical sociologies — those developed by Max Weber and by Florian Znaniecki. These sociologies seem to me only partly useful for the analysis of macroscale (ethnic, racial, industrial, and international) problems. They refer to human individual interactions within social collectivities, and not between them. If we (...) follow expressis verbis the individualistic aspects of Weber's model and the analytical aspects of Znaniecki's theory, it would be difficult to base empirical investigations of social relations. The situation changes when we depart from the classics' ways of construction of the concepts of social relation and concentrate on the implication of the concept presented by the same authors. Fortunately, the research practices of both scholars encourage us to abandon a literal interpretation of their models. They present a variety of interesting typologies of social relations and social objects between which these relations can exist. (shrink)

Although Barresi & Moore could have grounded their framework more explicitly in existing models, they offer a provocative testbed for the assumptions of symbolic interactionism and further thinking about self-regulation, especially in autistics.

Contemporary psychologists seem to pull in two theoretical directions, namely the reduction of mind to brain and the dissolution of mind in society. Against these dominant trends, this article employs the tools of critical realism to argue for the resuscitation in the discipline, psychology, of an ontologically distinct, psychological concept of mind. This ‘mind’ is conceived here as a real, ontologically emergent property. Its distinctive property is consciousness, generated in the first instance by unconscious, non-conscious and conscious psychological mechanisms. Nonetheless, (...) it is emergent not only from psychological mechanisms, but also biological and social mechanisms, all of which act together in open systems. The article builds on various accounts of the hierarchy of the sciences and their objects to suggest that there is such a real psychological object. It seeks to refute trends in psychological theory that reduce mind either to neuro-physiological and neurobiological properties on the one hand or to social relational and discursive properties on the other. (shrink)

Should we grant rights to artificially intelligent robots? Most current and near-future robots do not meet the hard criteria set by deontological and utilitarian theory. Virtue ethics can avoid this problem with its indirect approach. However, both direct and indirect arguments for moral consideration rest on ontological features of entities, an approach which incurs several problems. In response to these difficulties, this paper taps into a different conceptual resource in order to be able to grant some degree of moral consideration (...) to some intelligent social robots: it sketches a novel argument for moral consideration based on social relations. It is shown that to further develop this argument we need to revise our existing ontological and social-political frameworks. It is suggested that we need a social ecology, which may be developed by engaging with Western ecology and Eastern worldviews. Although this relational turn raises many difficult issues and requires more work, this paper provides a rough outline of an alternative approach to moral consideration that can assist us in shaping our relations to intelligent robots and, by extension, to all artificial and biological entities that appear to us as more than instruments for our human purposes. (shrink)

THE emphasis of modern and contemporary philosophy on the individual has led to finely honed theories about knowledge, morality, and being. These have produced a variety of insights, despite the fact that the human individual is always and necessarily found in a social context, and has no knowledge, morality, or being apart from a larger whole. The emphasis on the individual, however, has tended to overshadow concern with the social whole.

In this paper, I claim that even though the conventional account of illocution (Sbisà, in Lodz Pap Pragmat 5(1):33–52, 2009a; In: B Fraser, K Turner (eds) Language in life, and a life in language. Emerald, pp 351–357, 2009b) makes an attempt to theorize social relations in illocutions, the attempt is unsuccessful. Sbisà's conventional account fails to describe the ways in which a fair social agreement can be established. A fair social agreement is a key element for (...) the idea of social relations in the conventional account of illocution. However, considering the role of gender and power relations embedded in social construction, it is difficult to accept the possibility of such an agreement. Since Sbisà fails to provide a probe into power relations, her attempt to establish the point of social relationships remains insufficient. The main argument here is that in the unjust social milieu, the kind of social agreement essential to illocution is difficult. Moreover, what may look like a social agreement might be a result of the systemic oppression done to one particular group. In what follows, I claim that the problem of theorizing the social relation in illocutions remains unresolved. (shrink)

The article argues that Marx’s use of the concept of ideology in The German Ideology is incidental to a sustained critique of how those he described as the German ideologists think and reason about society and history and that this critique is not simply of an idealist theory that represents society and history as determined by consciousness but of methods of reasoning that treat concepts, even of those of political economy, as determinants. His view of how consciousness is determined historically (...) by our social being does not envisage some kind of mechanical transfer of class status to class consciousness. Rather, he works with an epistemology that takes the concepts foundational to political economy as expressions or reflections of the social relations of a mode of production. The difference between ideology and science is the difference between treating those concepts as the primitives of theory and treating them as sites for exploring the social relations that are expressed in them. Thus, the historical rather than further undermining claims to knowledge, provides both the conditions under which knowledge is possible and its limitations. (shrink)

Research on mobile health (mHealth) applications has investigated how such technologies contribute to a responsibilisation of users/patients. This literature largely focuses on the individual responsibilities constructed by the apps and the neoliberal environments that enable the positioning of the user as responsible. With this focus, this scholarship is less attentive to the role of social relations in responsibilisation. In this article, I demonstrate how relational responsibilities are constructed in the communication of a North American self-testing app for “early (...) changes in cognition”. Through an analysis of qualitative expert interviews and images on the app’s web presence, I show how social relations are, in fact, mobilised in the construction of the responsibilities to support the user in the test situation, to take the test for the sake of others, and to make others take the test. Based on this analysis, I argue that the role of social relations should receive more attention in the literature on responsibilisation, because they lead to additional, sometimes gendered responsibilities that a focus on individual responsibilities would miss. (shrink)

How do facial movements and verbal statements relate to emotional processes? A familiar answer is that the primary phenomenon is an internally located emotion that may then get expressed on the fac...

The study of Roman society and social relations has blossomed in the past thirty years. The purpose of this handbook is twofold. On the one hand, it synthesizes what has heretofore been accomplished in this field. On the other hand, it attempts to configure the examination of Roman social relations in some new ways, and thereby indicates directions in which the discipline might now proceed.

Ernst Fehr’s experimental research on altruistic behaviour aims at superseding the classical homo oeconomicus in micro-economic behaviour theory. This essay discusses Fehr’s results from two points of view: first, in regard to the understanding of social action associated with the term “altruism”; second, in regard to the ‘anthropological’ strategy of research that is based on the laboratory method. Against the emphasis on altruism it will be argued that it misleads into providing a distorted description of social acting, and (...) that, due to insufficient clarity about motives for acting, Fehr’s empirical results give evidence not of altruism but rather of phenomena of social recognition. The objection against the anthropological strategy will be that it makes visible only local phenomena within prevailing social conditions and that it thus assumes more than it explains. (shrink)

In this paper, I focus on recognition respect as a component of Anderson’s democratic equality – specifically, how it places certain requirements on the way political institutions such as states treat both citizens and non-citizens. I argue for two claims: that recognition respect is a plausible political (as well as ethical) value, and that it should be understood in large part as a matter of an agent’s material relational standing rather than as their merely being regarded in a certain way (...) by others. In particular, I argue that the second-personal emphasis of recognition respect, the conceptual requirement that recognising somebody as an agent involves recognising them as somebody to whom you are in principle accountable, requires that agents actually be able to hold you to account rather than merely that you see them as being the right sort of being to do so. In turn, this implies that recognition respect requires non-vulnerability. Together, these claims go some way towards further fleshing out democratic equality as a philosophical ideal, and determining what implications this ideal has for matters of theory and policy. (shrink)

Drawing on the great wealth of knowledge and experience of education practitioners and theorists, the volumes in the Sociology of Education set of the International library of Sociology explore the very important relationship between education and society. These books became standard texts for actual and intending teachers. Drawing upon comparative material from Israel, France and Germany, titles in this set also discuss the key questions of girls' and special needs education, and the psychology of education.

This paper focuses on the integration of generic software such as enterprise resource planning into organisational life. These applications have gained prominence as the IT systems of choice in many organisations. The perspective that dominates the literature studying these applications reflects a rationality based on alignment of the software and organisational processes and fails to consider the ethical issues that arise when a new work system is being constructed, such as the possibilities for end‐user participation. Drawing on the strand of (...) research that studies implementations of new technologies as social relations, this paper considers the experiences of end user groups as they engage in adaptation of the software and embed technology in contexts of local use. Design and use activities are complex and multifaceted and the embedding of software for local use represents an overlap between them. This paper explores whether the shift towards large scale generic software allows for a blurring of a boundary between what are construed as design activities and use activities in applications for office work. It is significant to the construction of this boundary that office work is gendered female in the U.K. where clerical and secretarial work is usually done by and considered to be suited to women. The paper draws on a case study of the introduction and integration of a generic software application for supporting the administration of student records at a UK university to explore the social relations of end‐user participation in the implementation of these software packages. The paper presents an analysis of the implementation activity, IToffice worker relations, and the different constructions of skills and knowledge understood to be required as the workers attempted to deal with this software application. (shrink)

Replying to Samuel Knafo and Benno Teschke, this article shows how Political Marxism offers powerful conceptual tools to understand modes of production that structure historical processes as fundamentally constituted by exploitative social and political relations. I explain how structure, or rules of reproduction, should be understood as alienated social relations, which are inherent to all class societies. Understanding structure this way leaves ample space for – and makes inevitable – the consideration of agency.

This article presents a new interpretation of the concept of social relations of production in Marx. Against G.A. Cohen, it argues that social relations of production are relations of interaction between persons, not relations of de facto control between persons and means of production. It argues further that these relations are relations of 'de facto recognition', that is, relations constituted by actions in which individuals treat each other as if they recognised (...) each other in certain ways, whether or not the relevant recognitional attitudes are present. (shrink)

The robotics industry is growing rapidly, and to a large extent the development of this market sector is due to the area of social robotics – the production of robots that are designed to enter the space of human social interaction, both physically and semantically. Since social robots present a new type of social agent, they have been aptly classified as a disruptive technology, i.e. the sort of technology which affects the core of our current (...) class='Hi'>social practices and might lead to profound cultural and social change. -/- Due to its disruptive and innovative potential, social robotics raises not only questions about utility, ethics, and legal aspects, but calls for “robo-philosophy” – the comprehensive philosophical reflection from the perspectives of all philosophical disciplines. This book presents the proceedings of the first conference in this new area, “Robo-Philosophy 2014 – Sociable Robots and the Future of Social Relations", held in Aarhus, Denmark, in August 2014. The short papers and abstracts collected here address questions of social robotics from the perspectives of philosophy of mind, social ontology, ethics, meta-ethics, political philosophy, aesthetics, intercultural philosophy, and metaphilosophy. -/- Social robotics is still in its early stages, but it is precisely now that we need to reflect its possible cultural repercussions. This book is accessible to a wide readership and will be of interest to everyone involved in the development and use of social robotics applications, from social roboticists to policy makers. (shrink)

This paper applies social-relational models of moral standing of robots to cases where the encounters between the robot and humans are relatively brief. Our analysis spans the spectrum of non-social robots to fully-social robots. We consider cases where the encounters are between a stranger and the robot and do not include its owner or operator. We conclude that the developers of robots that might be encountered by other people when the owner is not present cannot wash their (...) hands of responsibility. They must take care with how they develop the robot’s interface with people and take into account how that interface influences the social relationship between it and people, and, thus, the moral standing of the robot with each person it encounters. Furthermore, we claim that developers have responsibility for the impact social robots have on the quality of human social relationships. (shrink)

In this manuscript, I claim that the search for justice implies a complete reconfiguration of public space and a (radical) transformation of our social relations. I will argue through a negative path, i.e. starting from the comprehension of the experience of injustice. I will focus on the case of epistemic injustice since it illustrates how the unjustified harm it produces is originated in the structure of social relations. To reach my goal, I will attempt to bring (...) into dialogue two different philosophical debates —that which deals with the notion of the public space and that which discusses epistemic injustice—. This will help me show that epistemology has a fundamental and profound political dimension which needs to be addressed to find better avenues to search for and reach (epistemic and otherwise) justice. My main contention is that the possibility of constructing a functional public space depends on recognizing the confrontational character of politics and on not trying to erase the differences that make up society, nor trying to undo them under the idea of a (rational) consensus. (shrink)

According to relational egalitarianism, justice requires equal relations. The theory applies to those who stand in the relevant social relations. In this paper, I distinguish four different accounts of what it means to be socially related and argue that in all of them, self-relations—how a person relates to themselves—fall within the scope of relational egalitarianism. I also point to how this constrains what a person is allowed to do to themselves.

L’article se propose de retracer brièvement l’itinéraire et le fondement théorique (du marxisme au poststructuralisme) des termes « condition féminine », « rapports sociaux de sexe » et « genre » dans différentes disciplines (sociologie, histoire et science politique) en précisant la chronologie différenciée de leur usage en France et dans le monde anglophone.

In this paper we propose the notion of “subjective reference” as a conceptual tool that explains how and why human-robot sexual interactions could reframe users approach to human-human sexual interactions. First, we introduce the current debate about Sexual Robotics, situated in the wider discussion about Social Robots, stating the urgency of a regulative framework. We underline the importance of a social-relational approach, mostly concerned about Social Robots impact in human social structures. Then, we point out the (...) absence of a precise framework conceptualizing why Social Robots, and Sexual Robots in particular, may modify users’ sociality and relationality. Within a psychological framework, we propose to consider Sexual Robots as “subjective references”, namely objects symbolically referring to human subjects: we claim that, for the user experience, every action performed upon a Sexual Robot is symbolically directed toward a human subject, including degrading and violent practices. This shifting mechanism may transfer the user relational setting from human-robot interactions to human-human interactions. (shrink)