And yet there was some: Czesław Znamierowski’s social ontology

In the book “Making the Social World”, 2010, John Searle has famously claimed that there was and there could not have been social philosophy fifty years ago. What went around half a century or more ago under the title of “social philosophy” was, he claims, basically philosophy of social sciences, epistemology of society, and political philosophy. This claim is empirically false. Indeed in the paper the authors present an example of older-than-fifty-years social philosophy. It is the social philosophy developed under the name of “social ontology” by the Polish legal philosopher Czesław Znamierowski (1888-1967). Social ontology as proposed by Znamierowski in the 1920s branches out into two different kinds of ontological investigations: an ontology of “social reality” and an ontology of “thetic reality.” To these two branches are devoted the two sections of the paper. The first section of the paper presents a critical analysis and a conceptual reconstruction of the ontology of “social reality” sketched by Znamierowski in his essay “On social object and social fact”, 1921. Here Znamierowski claims that social sciences badly need a unified and unifying foundation of basic concepts such as “society”, “social act”, “social object”, “social function”—exactly this unifying discipline Znamierowski propounds to call “social ontology”—without which they (i.e. every single social science taken singly) grope in the dark and entangle themselves in absurdities. True to his research project, Znamierowski proposes a definition of “society” and his theory of social objects and social acts. The second section of the paper is dedicated to the ontology of thetic reality proposed by Znamierowski in the book “Basic concepts of the theory of law”, 1924. Here, discovering a new kind of acts and states of affairs that are made possibile by norms, Znamierowski distinguishes two different kinds of reality: psychophysical reality and thetic reality, a reality conventionally contructed. In this picture of everyday reality, the concept of “construction norm” (in Polish: norma konstrukcyjna) is fundamental. According to Znamierowski, construction norms are this kind of norms that create thetic reality, bestowing new conventional meaning on objects and acts.