Yorgos Karagiannopoulos

Social phenomena often appear ambiguous. A comment at work may seem like harmless flirting when it is actually harassment; a police officer stopping a car may look like a routine procedure while functioning as racial profiling; a campaign to “end autism” may present itself as benefiting those affected by it, even though it reproduces ableist and eugenic narratives; and “flexible workhours” may, more accurately, signal overexploitation. How can we reliably know whether certain behaviors are recognizable patterns of discrimination, exploitation and domination rather than just random inconvenient incidents? This dissertation advances the idea that social movements are principal agents in discerning such patterns because they are experts in uncovering social injustice. It specifically argues that social movements provide the training grounds for such expertise. Their experimental, versatile, and dynamic nature, as expressed in the various organizational forms that social movements have inhabited throughout their history, has a distinctive epistemic dimension: it cultivates the epistemic virtues that sharpen the accuracy of the movement’s theoretical glasses. The dissertation makes use of contemporary tools of analytical metaphysics and epistemology to spell out a realist defense of social movements’ epistemic powers.

How is the standpoint of the oppressed achieved? Those I call separatists argue that all have equal access to a given standpoint thereby separating the tight connection between social position and standpoint. By contrast, those I call unionists reason that the achievement of a standpoint is partially determined by one’s social position. In this chapter I side with the unionists. In defending unionism, I first show how the tension between separatists and unionists can be significantly diminished, if we distinguish between producing and possessing a standpoint. Separatists make a reasonable claim on the possession of a standpoint: Once created everyone should be able to access the knowledge originating from an oppressed standpoint. Unionists make a reasonable claim on the production of a standpoint: The production of the standpoint must be achieved by the oppressed themselves. If not, I argue, then their epistemic autonomy is violated.

A social fact S is grounded by some plurality of grounds. And the fact that S has the grounding-conditions it does is anchored by some set of anchors. Epstein has recently suggested (2019) that the anchoring relation is a cross-world determination relation. In this paper we put forward three arguments against this view. First, we argue from the analogy between social and non-social kinds: there is no cross-world determination involved in non-social natural kinds. Secondly, we take issue with the very idea of cross-world determination: no determination relation in our current metaphysical toolkit can have relata that occupy different possible worlds (in the relevant sense). Thirdly, we argue that cross-world anchoring generates an indeterminacy problem: if S holds in an anchorless world w, and there are distinct anchors (for S) holding at w1 and w2 respectively, then it is indeterminate whether S’s grounding-conditions hold in virtue of the w1-anchors or the w2-anchors.

In this paper we introduce the view that realism about a social kind K entails that the grounding conditions of K are difficult (or impossible) to manipulate. In other words, we define social kind realism in terms of relative frame manipulability (RFM). In articulating our view, we utilize theoretical resources from Epstein’s (Epstein, The ant trap: Rebuilding the foundations of the Social Sciences. Oxford University Press, 2015) grounding/anchoring model and causal interventionism. After comparing our view with causal and principle-based (Tahko, Synthese 200(2):1–23, 2022) proposals, we motivate RFM by showing that it accommodates important desiderata about the social landscape (such as recognizing the context-relativity of social properties and the emancipatory dimension of social practice). Finally, we consider three objections. First, we tackle frame-necessitarianism (FN), the view that social kind frames are metaphysically necessary (and thus unmanipulable). Secondly, we engage with what Epstein (Epstein, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 99(3):768–781 2019a) calls UNIVERSALITY (the view that social kinds can hold in the absence of anchors) and we argue that it should also be resisted. Finally, we tackle a recent objection from Mason’s (Mason, Philosophical Studies, 178(12):3975–3994) essentialism about social kinds.