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Truth and Social Reality: A Metaphysical Inquiry presents a new theory of social truth and social construction. The book weds truthmaker theory with recent work in social ontology, arguing that social truths are true in virtue of socially constructed portions of the world. It focuses on the construction of human social kinds like gender, race, class, and disability. The book offers novel accounts of social construction, realism, social kind pluralism, social context, the context-dependency of social truth, and social vagueness.
Overall,
Truth and Social Reality presents a realist picture of the social world on which there are objective truths about the way things are in the social world. Social truth is not socially constructed, despite being grounded in a socially constructed reality. The theory it provides nonetheless captures the contingency, alterability, and vagueness of the social world and the context dependency of social truth. The book also addresses the relationships between truth, power, and justice. It argues that truth itself is not a tool of oppression, as some maintain. Rather, truth and truth-telling play an essential role in upending oppression and achieving justice.
Truth and Social Reality rebuts the cynicism of the "post-truth" age by defending the possibility and value of social truth.
List of contents
- Introduction
- 1: Truth and Truthmaking
- 2: Truthmaking and Social Ontology
- 3: Realism and Social Reality
- 4: Socially Constructed Truthmakers I: Grounding
- 5: Socially Constructed Truthmakers II: Truthmaking
- 6: Social Contexts
- 7: Relativism, Contextualism, and Objectivity
- 8: Vagueness and Social Truth
- 9: Truth, Power, and Justice
- Conclusion
About the author
Aaron M. Griffith is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. He received his PhD from the University of California, Irvine. Before teaching at William & Mary, he held a teaching position at Central Michigan University. His research and teaching are on truth, truthmaking, grounding, social ontology, the philosophy of race, and nineteenth-century German philosophy. His work has appeared in
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Philosophical Studies, Synthese, Erkenntnis, and other journals.
