Johanna M. Mueller

Social ontology is the study of how the social world exists. Following a marked increase in philosophical research at the intersection of social ontology, feminist philosophy, and philosophy of race, recent work by Åsa Burman has championed a non-ideal approach to social ontology. She characterises and critiques the predominant ideal theory approach in social ontology, 'The Standard Model', and she advocates a shift to non-ideal approaches to social ontology that are vocal about illegitimate power relations. Building on Burman's work, this chapter argues that we should carefully distinguish non-ideal social ontology from what is sometimes termed 'critical social ontology' but is here referred to as 'emancipatory social ontology'. Emancipatory social ontology aims to not only highlight illegitimate power relations but also to intervene in them by providing tools to combat oppression. Accordingly, whether or not an account is considered to be non-ideal social ontology or emancipatory social ontology should make a difference to how we appraise it, since these two kinds of theory have different success conditions. This point is illustrated by showing how Burman's own account of social facts struggles to accommodate facts about kind membership (e.g. 'Katharine is a woman'). This would be a much more serious flaw if the account were considered as emancipatory social ontology rather than (as Burman intends it) non-ideal social ontology.